Perl returns the leftmost longest match when you use regular expressions. How do you get it to return the shortest match? e. g. 
$text = "the dog and the bear are quick, but the quick fox is quicker"
+;
$re = "the\\b.*?quick\\b.*?fox";
print "it matches \n" if ($text =~ /($re)/sg);
print $1 . "\n";

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I just want it to match "the quick fox" (the spaces could be any gobbledygook at all, I'm parsing HTML and can't use HTML::Parser). What I get is "the dog and the bear are quick, but the quick fox"

In reply to Getting the shortest match? by saintbrie

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