note ww <p>Better? Who knows? That depends on your intent, your data, etc.</p> <p>More concise (and less reliance on $_... which is easy to overuse):</p> <c>#!/usr/bin/perl use 5.014; # 988698 my $str = "yada yada <name> string-to-capture </name> foo bar baz"; if ( $str =~ m!<name>(.*?)<\/name>! ) { my $var1=$1; $var1 =~ s/ //g; # removing spaces? print "$var1\n"; }</c> <p>However, if the actual "<i>tags</i>" are intended to be html, xml or suchlike, your "<i>better way</i>" almost certainly involves using an appropriate parser.</p> 988698 988698