Another bit of the puzzle is that in the example you have give, the regular expression is being quoted using pipe symbols (|) instead of the usual forward slash. (Perl allows any non alphanumeric character to be used to quote a regular expression, if it starts with an explicit m).

As others have said, this is an unreliable way to parse regular expressions for a number of reasons. It is much better to use an existing XML parsing library from CPAN.

In reply to Re: regex and XML by chrestomanci
in thread regex and XML by Zapano

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