What you're probably seeing is the greedy behavior of dot-star. .* will match as much as it possibly can, so in your example, it should match "blue] blue [/color] word. And a [color=red] red [/color", not "blue". You could change your regular expression to one of the following options: 
# non-greedy dot-star
@colors = $new =~ m/(\[color=.*?\])/gi;

# say what you mean: match non-] characters
@colors = $new =~ m/(\[color=[^\]]*\])/gi;

[download]

-- Mike

--
just,my${.02}

In reply to Re: Regexp by thelenm
in thread regexp problem using custom markup by kidd

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