\w matches neither hyphens nor parentheses; to quote the documents (perlre) "\w Match a "word" character (alphanumeric plus "_").". You'll have to explicitly add the hyphen them to the regex.. Your regex will also fail for </TD>, which may not be what you want.

However, given your stated goal ("…I need it to match the entire line in $1 before it finds the </td>"), it would seem to me that your regex could just as easily read something like this:

push(@found_items, $1) if $data =~ m!(.*)</td>!i;

[download]
which, at first glance, looks as if it may work: everything up to </td> gets slurped into $1. Note that this WAS NOT TESTED.

emc

"Being forced to write comments actually improves code, because it is easier to fix a crock than to explain it. "
—G. Steele

In reply to Re: Help constructing a regex that also matches hyphens and parentheses by swampyankee
in thread Help constructing a regex that also matches hyphens and parentheses by Anonymous Monk

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