Monks,

I've not been able to figure this simple regex problem. I need to match strings in one of the two formats below (after reading from a file):

"/moreIters 10"
"/bootMe any text here"
/fewIter

If the string begins with a quote, I need all data enclosed within the quotes, else the entire string that begins with /

To begin with, I wrote the following simplistic regex:

$str =~ m,"?(/.*)"?,
[download]

which means match zero or 1 double quote, followed by / followed by any number of characters followed by an optional double quote. However, this doesn't work because .* matches the quotes as well, and I get the following:

my $str = qq( "/extend 100" );
$str =~ m,"?(/.*)"?,;
if (defined $1) {
   print "matched=$1\n";
}

$perl regex.pl 
matched=/extend 100"
[download]

The above works for strings such as /justThis:

my $str = qq(/extendMe );
$str =~ m,"?(/.*)"?,;
if (defined $1) {
   print "matched=$1\n";
}

$perl regex.pl 
matched=/extendMe
[download]

How can I refine this regex to get the desired result?

Thanks!

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