http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=147801


in reply to Death to Dot Star!

The last task, to match a question, can be solved quite easily by reversing the string.
my ($m) = reverse($myvar) =~ /"\?(.*?)"/s; $m = reverse $m; print "matched <$m>\n";
Note that it's OK to use .*? here. And due to optimizations in the regex engine it's even faster to use it than a negative char class, if the following pattern is constant as it is in this case.

It's also very easy to make it work for escaped quotes by adding a negative look-ahead.     my ($m) = reverse($myvar) =~ /"\?(.*?)"(?!\\)/s; Note that here you must use .*? instead of a negative char class since you want the engine to backtrack.

-Anomo