No real need to use nested *'s. Remember that the * character can be "greedy" in a regular expression, meaning that it finds more than one possibility, and will take the last one it gets. I used this: 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my $txt = "foo *text* bar *bat* bounce";

$txt =~ s/\*(.*?)\*/<em>$1<\/em>/g;

print $txt."\n";

[download]
Broken down:
s/ substitute
\* a star
(.*?) then a group of arbitrary characters (but only match once, see b
+elow)
\* then another star
/ replace it with
<em>$1<\/em> what we just got, surrounded by <em>'s
/g; do this across the entire string;

[download]


What .*?\* will do for you is match all characters for you before a star, but the ? tells it to stop matching after the first possibility. Without it, your output would look like 
foo <em>text* bar *bat</em> bounce
- instead of -
foo <em>text</em> bar <em>bat</em> bounce

[download]
Good luck with it. Having MacPerl shouldn't make any difference.     --jb

In reply to Re: How to bold text with regexp... by JayBonci
in thread How to bold text with regexp... by Anonymous Monk

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