Question

Sorry im new in perl and cannot find a similar answer.

html file

<div class="user_rating">
.
.
<span class="genre">
.
.
.
<span class="genre">
.
.
.
<span class="genre">
.
.
.
<span class="genre">

perl file

$content =~ /<div class="user_rating">(.*)<span class="genre">/gs;
$empty = $1;

this $empty variable contains information from <div class="user_rating"> to the last <span class="genre">.

But i just want the information from <div class="user_rating"> to the first <span class="genre">.
how should i modify my code? i know it is a regular expression problem.

Any help plz…

Answer 1

Modify your regexp, because .* is greedy.

$content =~ /<div class="user_rating">(.*?)(<span class="genre">){1}/gs;