The issue is not so much any obvious misunderstanding of m//g as failure to consider greediness. Read about that, using perldoc perlretut or your own choice of reference, and note the limit on greed (in the form of a "?" after each "*" in the code below.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

#829607

=head
The idea was to get two lines like:
foo, <anystring 1 />
bar, <anystring 2 />

=cut

my $string = "<name=\"foo\"><anystring 1 /></name><name=\"bar\"><anyst
+ring 2 /></name>";

while ($string =~ m/<name=\"(.*?)\">(.*?)<\/name>/g)    { 
    print "$1, $2\n"; 
}
[download]

Output:

ww@GIG:~/pl_test$ perl 829607.pl
foo, <anystring 1 />
bar, <anystring 2 />
ww@GIG:~/pl_test$
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