The first thing you should try is "non-greedy" regular expression match. "Non-greedy" means "match as little as possible" and all you need to change is to add a question mark:

Hope this helps

Update: reading Juerd's answer I am starting to think that possibly I have misinterpreted the question ;) So yes, if you are having problems extracting the match, it is in $1. If you are just having a problem of something matching too much -- a greedy regexp may be to blame.

As far as I can remember it took me days to understand greedy/non-greedy regexps when I started learning Perl ;)