How do I create a Perl regular expression to remove all characters before the first "<"?

Question

I currently have this: tr/[.]+(?=<)//d which should remove all characters (represented by [.]+) up to the first "<", because I'm using a positive lookahead. But for some reason, it's removing all "." and "<" from the string.

For the record, I am not processing HTML or XML with regular expressions.

Answer 1

Edit as it was clarified:

if ($line =~ /^.+?<(.+)/) {
  push @matched, $1;
}

Answer 2

The meaning of characters change when used in [] as a character class. [.] has no meaning, really, different from just . so the . is interpreted literally in that context.

I think this should work just fine:

$text =~ s/^.*?</</s;

Answer 3

You do not want tr.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

while ( <DATA> ) {
    last unless /\S/;
    s/^.+?</</;
    print;
}

__DATA__
a < b < c
a < b < c

Answer 4

^[^<]+

. (dot) within the character class is a literal dot, not a wildcard.

Answer 5

The '.' in a character class is not a meta-character. Also you want s///, not tr, which replaces single characters. so s/^.+(?=<)// should work, although personally I would write s{^.*<}{<}, to avoid the lookahead thingie.