I am struggling with regular expressions. I know the fundamentals..

/>(.+) and (^\w+)</

Apparently not. Are the characters 'a', 'n', and 'd' special regex characters? If not, what do those characters match when inside a regular expression?

use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.010;

my @strings = (
    'hello',
    'hello >knowled<ge< goodbye',
    'hello >knowledge< goodbye',
    'hello >!knowledge< goodbye',
);


for (@strings) {
    if ( />(.+)</ ) {

        my $word = $1;

        if ( $word =~ /^\w[^><]*$/ ) {
            say $word;
        }
    }
}

--output:--
knowledge
[download]

None of the solutions posted so far will yield the same results.

You could write:

 if ( />(.+)/ and /(^\w+)</ ) {
    #...do something
}
[download]

But those regexes don't fully express the match you are looking for.

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