I think you may be looking for a "zero-width positive lookahead" such as ([^<\/td>]) or m#...([^</td>])#; depending on your selection of regex delimiters. One of the above will match anything until a </td>.

UPDATE: Thanks, ikegami (see below). The character class is just flat wrong! But (well, actually, " And") so is the rest of my brain_spasm above this line. ...   ....argh!

You appear to have solved the issue of where to start such a match in your addendum/update, below

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

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