Hi there, I am far from understanding perl - but I have to get along with it. In other words, I'm completely new to this. :-(

So here's the problem I'm going to town with: I'd like to parse a line of text for a keyword, and then "split" the line at that place. I need the text prior to the match also, and the keywords may occur more than once.

To stick with the perlfaq example, let's say my text is 

$restofline = "One fish two fish red fish blue fish";

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To split the words "one", "two", "red" and "blue" I tried a simple match: 
    while($restofline =~ m/(.*)fish(.*)/)
    {
        $beginofline = $1;
        $restofline = $2;
        
        #.... do some mighty magic
    }

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Sooo ....
What happens is that it always finds the LAST match instead of the first! The Problem seems to be the "(.*)" to the left of the keyword. As soon as I try 
$restofline =~ m/fish(.*)/

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it works fine. But how do I get the text to the left of the matched keyword then?

I tried several things like the g modifier, {1} and + match quantifiers, but to no avail. It either works like finding the last match or it doesn't work at all.

Can you guys please tell me what I did wrong and - even more important - how to do that right?

Thanks in advance, Faltblatt

In reply to match last element instead of first?? by Anonymous Monk

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