The problem is precisely that \1 in a character class is not a backreference: it refers to the ASCII character chr(1), an abbreviation of the octal escape sequence \001.

You can achieve what you want with a slightly more complicated approach using negative lookahead:

  m{
    \A    # anchor to start
    (\W)  # open text
    (?: (?!\1) . )*  # anything that isn't the closer
    \1    # close text
    (\W)  # separator
  }xs

[download]

That works for the general case, when you simply want to match a bunch of stuff not containing a given substring. In this case though, you want to match "up to the first occurrence" of that substring, so it's much simpler - you just need a minimal match:

  m{
    \A    # anchor to start
    (\W)  # open text
    .*?   # anything contained, up to the ...
    \1    # ... close text
    (\W)  # separator
  }xs

[download]

(I've taken the liberty of replacing your '+' with '*', on the assumption that you want to allow empty fields.)

Hugo

In reply to Re: Regular Expresssion TroubleShoot Help plz by hv
in thread Regular Expresssion TroubleShoot Help plz by MajingaZ

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