Like chromatic said, it is the .+ that is messing you up. You can make that non-greedy by appending a ?. So, your example might become: 
while ( $string =~ m!(<a[^>]*>)(.+?</a[^>]*>)!ig )
{
      print "$1 \n";
      print "$2 \n";
}

[download]
I tried that against a portion of your example string (after replacing the <'s and >'s), and it seemed to work ok. I'm pretty much a newbie, so I imagine there are better ways to do it then I have described. Edit: By the way, it's the "g" option on the regex that makes it work in that "while". I guess when it tries to do a multiple match, it will eventually fall off the end, and return a false. Without the "g", that while statement I used will run forever, as long as the string contains a single match to your regexp.

In reply to Re: Regex isn't performing like I think it should by jmarshall99
in thread Regex isn't performing like I think it should by Popcorn Dave

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