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[nutballs]

yes, strip tags is faster. however, I have also had less than predictable results from that as well.

plus its a personal pref. I don't like using magic voodoo functions that I get surprised by when they get "upgraded" later on. It has happened too many times in thepast to me.

[Bompa]

Ah cool thanks Bompa,
I thought ? meant that the group or sign in front of ? can only occur once.
So what if I whant everything in before the third </div> tag ?
Is it /<div(.*){3}</div>/s 

The ? does mean 0 or 1 times when it is used as a quantifier.

Anyways, you said "selected sites", so you will know what type of html that
you have to deal with. 

The way I usually deal with this situation is with a while loop.

Code:

$string =<<"here";
<div id1="content">
<p>blabla content bla</p>
</div>
<div id2="nextcontainer>
<p>blabla</p>
</div>
<div id3="nextcontainer>
<p>blabla</p>
</div>
<div id4="nextcontainer>
<p>blabla</p>
</div>
here

while($string =~ /<div(.*?)<\/div>/sg) {
  ++$divcounter;
  if($divcounter == 2) { print "$1\n"; }
}

This prints the 3rd div cuz the counting starts at zero.

The g modifier needs to be there at the end of the regex.

good luck,
Bompa