You might want to look at Death to Dot Star! to why it is getting rid of the whole thing

(Unless you have nested parenteses, as Hofmator pointed out.) And if you have (), the above won't remove it, unless you change the + to a *.

Also, any reason why you put the contents between the ()'s into $1? Are you going to use it later?

Remember that * is *greedy* ... it will match the longest possible substring. So, given a string like

(*) Microsoft Internet Exploder (which calls itself "Mozilla") - a pro
+duct of a convicted violator of the Sherman Act (wow)
[download]

That greedy quantifier will snatch up that * after the opening paren, and not stop till it gets to the ) that follows the "wow" (that IS the longest substring that matches your RE).

As to the suggestion you use a character class (hint: match one or more things that aren't closing parentheses), see Death to Dot Star! for a discussion of why not to use .*

HTH!

perl -e 'print "How sweet does a rose smell? "; chomp ($n = <STDIN>); 
+$rose = "smells sweet to degree $n"; *other_name = *rose; print "$oth
+er_name\n"'
[download]

You're being bitten by the "greediness" of regular expressions. They try to match as much of the string as possible - which, in this case, is all of it.

To make the regex "non-greedy" put a '?' after the greedy part of the regex.

You might also like to take a look at Death to Dot Star!

Perl Training in the UK <http://www.iterative-software.com>

As a better fix, create a character class that doen't include brackets, and use that instead...

--
RatArsed, in search of enlightment and asprin.