I believe what is happening is a result of the regex's left-to-right behavior. The first thing that the regex is going to match is the A HREF stuff, which means as soon as it sees the first line, it's happy, and only then looks at the .*? portion. In this case it will then move to the right in non-greedy fashion and when it encounters your date string, it's happy. So it's a valid match by the regex system, but obviously not the match you want.

what you probably need to do it use Japhy's sex eger reverse RE's to get this, since you really want to match the date first, then go right-to-left. The link has more info on how to set this up (this requires no new modules, fortunately).

Alternatively, if the data you want is strictly in a table, you could try some of the HTML table parsers at CPAN, but this might be more than necessary and would not be extensible.

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Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain