Your question has been directly answered, but there is a major pitfall to your approach. Even using the non-greedy match, you will run into problems with nested tags. Example:

    $input = '<foo>bar<foo>oops</foo></foo>';
    print $input =~ m{<foo>(.*?)</foo>}, "\n";

    __OUTPUT__
    bar<foo>oops
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This is one big reason you should avoid simple regular expressions for parsing nested formats, like HTML. The best solution is to use a real parser that actually understands its source data, rather than simple pattern matches.