Re: Capture only first match in regular expression

[Peter Tuente]

Hi Zapanaz,

the default behaviour of regular expression terms is to be "greedy", so to
suppress this behaviour to become "not greedy" you have to apply a single
question mark "?" right after the desired expression(s). Sounds some kind of
complex, but I hope you get me ;-)

In your case the following should be sufficient:

# old: if($content =~ /.*(<a.*<\/a>).*/i){
$anchorContent = $1;

# new:
if($content =~ /.*?(<a.*?<\/a>).*/i){
$anchorContent = $1;

The effect is, that the first expression ".*" becomes not so greedy eating
all the possible chars (incl. one/some "<a" chars that prefix the last
occurrence of "<a" in the current line). Same with the second ".*".

Hope this helps ;-)

Bye.

PiT