What you want is a loop. Perl has several different kinds of loop - for, foreach, while, until, etc. They all boil down to the same thing, but depending on what you're doing, one type of loop might be more convenient than then other.

use v5.12;
use strict;
use warnings;

# Obscure but easy way of reading a file into a string to match agains
+t...
$_ = do { local (@ARGV, $/) = 'loop.txt'; <> };

# Extract text we're interested in...
my @matches = m{<a>(.+?)</a>}sg;

# Loop through the matches...
foreach my $match (@matches)
{
    # This block gets executed for each match!
    say "GOT: $match";
}
[download]

Thanks!

And your level of knowledge is?

See htmltreexpather.pl , Parsing HTML / Re^4: Parsing HTML, A regex question , NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day / Re: NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day , Re: Extracting HTML content between the h tags, Re^2: Help With Online Table Scraper, Re^4: web::scraper using an xpath, ....

Every other day someone is either trying to parse html, or parse csv -- search, its for everybody :) HTML Parser suggestions

My level of knowledge is close to 0. But I'm reading the material you provided. And I want to thank you!

tobyink has provided an excellent solution. For your future reference--and in case the need arises again--there are Perl modules that can be used for parsing the kind of text you have. Here's an example that uses Mojo::DOM to parse your <a> tags:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Mojo::DOM;

my $text = <<END;
<a>
word1
word2
word3
</a>
<a>
word4
word5
</a>
<a>
word6
word7
</a>
END

my $dom = Mojo::DOM->new($text);

my $i = 1;
for my $chunk ( $dom->find('a')->each ) {
    print 'Chunk ' . $i++ . ': ' . $chunk->text . "\n";
}
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Output:

Chunk 1: word1 word2 word3
Chunk 2: word4 word5
Chunk 3: word6 word7
[download]

Thus, each group that you need to analyze is contained by $chunk->text within the for loop.

Hope this helps!

It really helps, thanks.

I was wondering. I see that $chunk->text doesn't preserve the new line at the end of each word. Since I need to check stuff that are in lines (I did simply my code a little in the previous example) I was wondering if I could do something like these:

for my $chunk ( $dom->find('s')->each ) {
    my @values = split('\n', $chunk);
        foreach $line (@values) {
            do stuff on every line
        }
}
[download]

I'm trying it right now. I hope it works.

Thanks again!

Yes, splitting the 'chunk' is a good solution! However, since you've noticed the chunk lacks newlines, change:

my @values = split('\n', $chunk);

to

my @values = split /\s+/, $chunk;
[download]

• This splits on whitespace
• It uses a regex, not a string literal (also, '\n' would not be interpolated into a newline since you've used single quotes)
• Parentheses are optional