Given two delimiters over potentially more than one line, it seems easier and more maintainable to me to separate the matching operations, for example:
my $phase = 0;
my $start = '<a';
my $finish = 'NGC:003288';
my $content = '';
while( <> ) {
    if ( $phase == 0 ) {
        if ( /$start(.*)$/ ) {
            $phase++;
            $_ = $1;
        }
        else {
            next;
        }
    }
    if ( $phase == 1 ) {
        if ( /(.*)$finish/ ) {
            $content .= $1;
            last;
        }
        $content .= $_;
    }
}

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-M

Free your mind

In reply to Re: help match this by Moron
in thread help match this by Anonymous Monk

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