okay here's what i want to do , connecting to a website to retrieve info and remove all the html crap. example:
var %r = <li><a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/rfc/rfc1459.html"><b>RFC1459 </b></a></li>
var %d,%s = $regsub(%r,/(<[^>]+>)/g,$chr(32),%d)

in the example above i need the url, but the $regsub removes it, how would i fix it.

for anywhere else my $regsub there works fine.

Try this:

or this:
The captured subpatterns are represented by \1, \2, \3 etc.

yea that works for the example above , but it shall work with the other bits too where it shall just remove all html code

thanks for your effort.

BTW, what's the role of the ?'s in the following pattern?

$regsub(%r,/^.*?<a href="(.+?)".*/,\1,%d)

If it means "allow .* (or .+) zero or one time", it might be unnecessary for this pattern.

It makes the pattern "ungreedy", where it takes the minimum number of characters to match the pattern.

As Nimue said, the "?" makes the quantifier ungreedy. If you want more info, PCRE's man.txt explains what greedy/ungreedy is around line 1500.

Oh, thats very clever indeed thank you for the clarification.