Got an issue where I have repeating patterns in a single string and I need a way to match on all of them. Using a while loop and the global modifier does the trick but I have one peculiarity.

The test code I have is as follows:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my $string = <<END;
start
start
start
go
one
end
start
start
start
go
two
end
END

while ($string =~ /(start.+?end)/gis) {
    print $1,"\n\n";
}
[download]

This will print out something like this:

start
start
start
go
one
end

start
start
start
go
two
end
[download]

This, of course, is not what I want. I would like it to only print out:

start
go
one
end

start
go
two
end
[download]

I need somehow to ignore the preceding starts. I have tried using (?:.*) but this only prints out the second group for some reason. Any ideas?

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