in reply to
Storing Substitution Output String
s///; returns the string sent to it if no substitutions actually happened.
You might try something like this:
#!usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my $page2 = '';
while( <DATA> ){
if( s!<title>(.*)</title>!<li>A$1C</li>!gi ){
$page2 .= $_;
}
}
print $page2;
__DATA__
<title>first story</title>
This story is short.
<title>second story</title>
This story is longer. But not much longer.
I used a ! instead of the / as the delimiters, so I could leave the literal slashes alone in the regex.