As an alternative to Corion's suggestion, you can anchor your expression to the start of the string.

/^.{0,80}\Q<?xml\E/s

You will likely need the s modifier so . will match newlines and escaping expressions containing punctuation (\Q...\E) is a good habit to get into. See perlretut for details.

In reply to Re: Limiting search on RegEx by kennethk
in thread Limiting search on RegEx by mr_p

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