Thanks for the detailed reply :-)

Although I can follow what you are doing in your code example, I'm a bit confused about one thing. You seem to be processing the @data array line by line, whereas I'm reading my data into a single string variable (slurping, as recommended by the forum). Please correct me if I've misunderstood :-)

Where you have:

my @data =
    ('<p id=paragraph_1>',
    '<a href="http://www.link1.com">Link1</a>', 
    '<a href="http://www.link2.com">Link2</a>',
    '<a href="http://www.link3.com">Link3</a>', 
    '</p>',
    '<p id=paragraph_2>',
    '<a href="http://www.link4.com">Link4</a>', 
    '<a href="http://www.link5.com">Link5</a>', 
    '<a href="http://www.link6.com">Link6</a>',
    '</p>',);
[download]

I seem to have:

While googling, I came across the pos() function, which is used to find the offset or position of the last matched substring. Maybe this could help me when slurping files?