Hi,

Try :

while(<PAGE>)
{
    if (/pond.*\((\w+)\)/)
    {        print "$1\n";
     }
}
close(PAGE);
[download]

output:

start
end
[download]

$_ is the default scalar variable. In your while loop, when you read the file, you are NOT specifying any variable to hold the line read from file. So its kept in $_. Again for your regular expression, you are not specify any string/variable to match with. So it again match with $_. So when you print $_, it prints entire line. Again, $1 contains the first matching string. For details please have a look at perlre and perlvar

The above code is same as

while($_ = <PAGE>)
{
    if ( $_ =~ /pond.*\((\w+)\)/)
    {        print "$1\n";
     }
}
close(PAGE);
[download]

or can be written without relying on $_ as

my $line;
while($line = <PAGE>)
{
    if ($line =~ /pond.*\((\w+)\)/)
    {        print "$1\n";
     }
}
close(PAGE);
[download]

Cheers !

--VC