The easiest way is to change your .* to be an appropriate negated character class or to use the ? modifier on the greedy * to make it less greedy.

  1. print  $#{[$lines =~ /aaa[^b]*bbb[^c]*ccc\s*dddd/gsi]} + 1 . "\n";  # or ...
  2. print  $#{[$lines =~ /aaa.*?bbb.*?ccc\s*dddd/gsi]} + 1 . "\n";

See the documentation in perlre and perlrequick and perlretut

PerlJam

In reply to Re: regex matches more than I want by duff
in thread regex matches more than I want by Anonymous Monk

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