Help Needed, 
$_ = '<a href= ?a=500011&w=2&r=1 >joe@blow.com</a>'

print $& if /^<a href.*>[^\z])/;
print $& if /^<a href.*>(?=[^\z])/x;

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the 1st print prints "<a href= ?a=500011&w=2&r=1 >j" the 2nd print prints the entire string "$_". why is that? This is under Activestate perl 5.6.1 for winNT. What i really want is the stuff to the right of the 1st '>' character. the stuff to the left of the 1st '>' is too unpredictable to allow a flexible approach to stop the .* from "eating up" everything until the very last '>'. The 1st statment stops the .* but $' does not include the 'j' from "joe" and thus $' is not correct for my purposes. I thought the extended zero-width lookahead would solve my problem but it doesn't act like i expect. With the exception of the values of $' and $&, shouldn't those expressions have the same results? Thanks in advance jroberts

In reply to Extended Regular Expressions by jroberts

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