I am trying to use a regular expression to extract text from a large number of .txt files. I have phrases that demarcate the beginning and ending of the piece of text I want to extract. However these phrases are potentially in other parts of the document as well. The specific problem I am trying to tackle is when the beginning phrase is repeated twice without the ending phrase occurring. This leads me to collect more of the text than I want. Hopefully this specific example will help explain my problem.

When I run this code:

$x = "dog 789 cat dog dog bird cat wonder dog frog cat"; 

@finds = ($x =~ /((?:dog)(?:.*?)(?:cat))/g);

[download]

I end up with: 

 
$finds[0] = dog 789 cat
$finds[1] = dog dog bird cat
$finds[2] = dog frog cat

[download]

How do I change my regular expression to skip over the second "dog" and end up with $finds[1] = dog bird cat?

Thanks in advance! Please excuse me if I have broken any protocols. I'm quite new to Perl and this is my first time seeking help here.

In reply to Rematching within a regular expression by jeff987

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