For the single regex to work, you would need to add the "s" modifier at the end, so that your ".*" doesn't stop matching at the first line-break character. Also, depending on the nature of the OP's data, it may need to be a non-greedy match: 
   # ...
   if ( $file =~ /$start_pattern(.*?)$end_pattern/s ) {
      print $1;
   }
   # ...

[download]
update: Forgot to mention: if the OP's data happens to contain more than one "start ... end" sequence within the same file, this would have to be structured as a loop -- something like: 
   #
   while ( $file =~ /start_pattern(.*?)$end_pattern/gs ) {
      print "$1\n";
   }
   #

[download]

In reply to Re: Re: Grabbing part of an HTML page by graff
in thread Grabbing part of an HTML page by kingdean

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