in reply to Regex Problem

Your post could use a little improvement, such as wrapping input in <code> tags and clearly specifying your desired output - I can't really follow your spec. See How do I post a question effectively?.

I think you can meet your spec using:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; $_ = 'childhe.com/pas/ apstpldr.dll.html? affid=177194&uid=& guid=4E83 +C7975FCD4 4B091226646F461D89 1/pas/apstpldr.dll .html?affid=177194 &u +id=&guid= 4E83C7975FCD44B091 226646F461D89'; s/\?.*?(?=\/|$)//g; print;

which outputs:

childhe.com/pas/ apstpldr.dll.html/pas/apstpldr.dll .html

YAPE::Regex::Explain interprets this regular expression as:

The regular expression: (?-imsx:\?.*?(?=/|$)) matches as follows: NODE EXPLANATION ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (?-imsx: group, but do not capture (case-sensitive) (with ^ and $ matching normally) (with . not matching \n) (matching whitespace and # normally): ---------------------------------------------------------------------- \? '?' ---------------------------------------------------------------------- .*? any character except \n (0 or more times (matching the least amount possible)) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (?= look ahead to see if there is: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- / '/' ---------------------------------------------------------------------- | OR ---------------------------------------------------------------------- $ before an optional \n, and the end of the string ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ) end of look-ahead ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ) end of grouping ----------------------------------------------------------------------

See perlretut for more information on regular expressions.