It's notoriously poor form to try to parse html with regular expressions. You might want to look at HTML::Parser or XML::XPath or one of the million other choices.

Your approach might otherwise work (some of the time) except that 1nd should be 1st?

m/\Q<!--\E\s*1st table\s*\Q-->\E(.*?)\Q<!--\E\s*\/1st table\s*\Q-->\E/
+g
[download]

I very strongly agree:   do not use regular expressions to parse HTML code. Do not treat the input that you have been given as a “string.”

Use one of the many HTML-parsing tools already mentioned to transform the HTML input into a data-structure consisting of Perl hashes and lists. Then, navigate through the structure. (You can even find assistance, in so-called “XPath expressions,” to do that part without having to write custom code.)

Although you have correctly made your regex non-greedy, it "can't get a match" because 1nd (in the regex) does not match 1st (in the data):

my $output = "<!-- 1st table -->What I want 1<!-- /1st table -->more s
+tuff...<!-- 2st movie -->What I want 2<!-- /2st movie -->...more stuf
+f...<!-- 3st movie -->What I want 3<!-- /3st movie -->...more stuff";

if ($output =~ /<!-- 1st table -->(.*?)<!-- \/1st table -->/g) {
    print  $1;
}
else{
    print "Nothing Here!";
}
[download]

perl 23.pl
What I want 1

1. Your /g isn't doing what your think. You've tried to specify a single set of tags. /g will find the content between them if they're repeated, but it won't find "2st ^sic movie
2. Your pseudo-html makes no sense: tables without rows or data cells?
3. Using LWP or similar, if you're not, could save you the trouble of saving the source data as a text file
4. It's a tad peculiar to name the input FH in your code as "OUTPUT"
5. and, if you're going to parse html, use a module. There are just too many ways to go wrong while rolling your own.

The problem is that is the tags has sometihing like:



my $output = "<!-- 1st table -->
What I want 1<!-- /1st table -->more stuff...<!-- 2st movie -->
What I want 2<!-- /2st movie -->...more stuff...<!-- 3st movie -->What
+ I want 3<!-- /3st movie -->...more stuff";
[download]



Like a carriage return or something like that I can't get it to match.

am: use the download download link beneath the code to capture it rather than copy-pasting... or remove the newlines from what you copy-pasted until you have the $output as a single line in your editor.

and... updating the previous: I realized, belatedly, that you appear to want to capture the contents of all the tag pairs, rather than just the first. Sorry, the code I posted captures only the first and so far, I haven't worked out a simple (aka, "elegant") and understandable way to do them all with a regex. CF advise to use an html parser or (new suggestion) a module designed to deal with matching pairs. Perhaps wiser monks will offer more particular suggestions.

for a quick hack, I'd suggest using

([^<]+)
[download]

Why something like this doesn't work?



if ( $line_test=~/<!-- 1st table -->\s*(.*?)\s*<!-- \/1st table -->/g)
+{print $1;}
[download]



If it has a carriage return or new line.

Try adding an "s" modifer, along with your"g".

s

Treat string as single line. That is, change "." to match any character whatsoever, even a newline, which normally it would not match.

     "As you get older three things happen. The first is your memory goes, and I can't remember the other two... " - Sir Norman Wisdom

One of those should probably do the trick for you.