I've been trying several ways in manipulate a string to replace everything in between two sets of strings and so far no luck. I've even used the /s and /m modifiers since the Deitel book was talking about multiline and single line figuring that the "." character would match everything but newline, which I will/do have.

I'm not sure if the $last string matches right after the the $first string, but let's just say that it does and there's only one in the entire $string for now, but additional ways to do this would be a bonus for future use.

Thank you in advance for all your help. 

my $string='foo bar foo bar
<span id="box1" class="box1">
foo bar
foo bar
</span> foo bar';

$first='<span id="box1';
$last='/span>';
$reserve='<!-- BOX1 -->';

$string =~ s/$first(.*?)$last/$reserve/;

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So just to be clear, how can I get the substitution operator to replace everything in my tag with a another tag such as a comment?

In reply to Replacing everything in between using s///; by JayBee

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