To answer your direct question, the text captured by the parentheses is placed into $1 each time. So you can do this: 
while ($page =~ /<b>(.*?)<\/b>/g) {
    # Now $1 contains the matched text
}

[download]

However, there are a few problems with the regex itself that you should be aware of. First, you're using .*, which matches as much as it can. So if your text is "<b>foo</b> <b>bar</b>", the parentheses will capture "foo</b> <b>bar"... not what you expect. Using .*? (non-greedy) will correct that problem.

Second, you say you're matching "lines", but you're also using the /s modifier on your regex, which means that the dot will match newlines. If you don't want newlines to be able to match a dot in your regex, then don't use /s.

Third, if you're extracting data from HTML, and especially if you anticipate doing this for more than your single page of text, you'll probably want to use an HTML parser module. HTML::Parser or HTML::TokeParser are examples. Good luck!

-- Mike

--
just,my${.02}

In reply to Re: Help Pattern Matching by thelenm
in thread Help Pattern Matching by Anonymous Monk

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