I have a problem with a regular expression - I need to match and capture a regular expression which may or may not be surrounded by brackets, but do not want to capture the surrounding brackets. The code which I have is like this - Note that the regular expression has been simplified to /ab/ in this example: 

my ($match) = $string =~ /<(ab)>/;
($match) = $string =~ /(ab)/ unless defined $match;

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This feels however as if it could be simplified into a single regular expression.

In reply to Help with Regular Expression matching by Anonymous Monk

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