another solution, without regular expressions. I assumed that you're reading from a file, and that you want to read in more the one lump of data: 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

{
        local $/ = ":::"; # read stuff separated by :::


        while(<DATA>) {
                s/:::$//; # remove the ::: at the end of
                          # each lump of data

                print "found a piece -->$_<--\n\n";
        }

}
__DATA__
Some foo:::This is a some text. It talks about CGI::Carp, but
then suddenly changes subject to matching three :'s in a row
:::
The server asked you what permission you
had to tell it what to do on it's day off. This was your day.:::
More foo.

[download]

hope that helps

--
Brigitte    'I never met a chocolate I didnt like'    Jellinek
http://www.horus.com/~bjelli/         http://perlwelt.horus.at

In reply to Re: Help!! Regular Expressions by bjelli
in thread Regular expression to match text between two tags (was: Help!! Regular Expressions) by providencia

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