diff --git a/manifests/pip.pp b/manifests/pip.pp
index 1ac36773..5c818e40 100644
--- a/manifests/pip.pp
+++ b/manifests/pip.pp
@@ -238,12 +238,20 @@
       }
 
       'latest': {
+        $include_pre_releases = $install_args =~ /(^| )--pre($| )/
+
+        $exclude_pre_releases_command = $include_pre_releases ? {
+            true    => '',
+            # The below regexp is based on this code, assuming that it is semi-authoritative on the PEP440 versioning:
+            # https://github.com/pypa/packaging/blob/21.3/packaging/version.py#L230-L235
+            default => ' | grep -vP "(a|b|c|rc|alpha|beta|pre|preview)[-_\.]?(\d+)?"',
+        }
+
         # Unfortunately this is the smartest way of getting the latest available package version with pip as of now
-        # Note: we DO need to repeat ourselves with "from version" in both grep and sed as on some systems pip returns
-        # more than one line with paretheses.
-        $latest_version = join(["${pip_env} install ${proxy_flag} ${pkgname}==notreallyaversion 2>&1",
-                                ' | grep -oP "\(from versions: .*\)" | sed -E "s/\(from versions: (.*?, )*(.*)\)/\2/g"',
-                                ' | tr -d "[:space:]"'])
+        $latest_version = join(["${pip_env} install ${pypi_index} ${proxy_flag} ${pkgname}==notreallyaversion 2>&1",
+                               ' | grep -oP "\(from versions: \K(.*)(?=\))" | tr -d "[:space:]" | tr "," "\n"',
+                               $exclude_pre_releases_command,
+                               ' | tail -n1'])
 
         # Packages with underscores in their names are listed with dashes in their place in `pip freeze` output
         $pkgname_with_dashes = regsubst($pkgname, '_', '-', 'G')