For example, in XML::XSH2, a wrapper around XML::LibXML, you can write just

open :F html file.html ;
my $words = //span[@itemprop="author"]/text() ;
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People often object that using a full-blown HTML/XML parser on "just a simple string" is overkill: it's "too much code". The reply to this is that a "simple string" all too often becomes complicated (*ML is, after all, a complicated spec), and then the overhead of maintaining a regex-based solution can explode. Do you know of a tutorial or discussion on this or any site along the lines of Dominus's Why it's stupid to `use a variable as a variable name' that addresses "Why It's Stupid to Parse HTML/XML With Regexes"?

I usually link to this question on StackOverflow. Its top answer is quite funny, but some of the other answers are more informative.
لսႽ† ᥲᥒ⚪⟊Ⴙᘓᖇ Ꮅᘓᖇ⎱ Ⴙᥲ𝇋ƙᘓᖇ

Closer (though still not correct) is:

    $words =~ s/<.*>//g;
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which means "get rid of "<" and ">" and anything between. The reason it's still not correct is because it will delete multiple <...> ... <...> from the line, including the text within it. (try it and see). That is to say, it matches (and deletes) this entire line:

    <span class="author-name" itemprop="author">Romaxton</span>
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A real solution would be:

    $words =~ s/<[^>]+>//g;
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where the "[^>]+" part means "1 or more of any character except greater-than ">". That regex should therefore get rid of all occurrences of <...> in the line, without removing non-tag text in between.

Edit: it's worth pointing out another solution would be to use the "non-greedy" quantifier "?" in "still not correct" example I gave above:

    $words =~ s/<.*?>//g;
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which would have the effect of matching the shortest possible "<...>" each time, and thus avoid getting multiple pairs.

Edit 2: fixed misspelling of "$word" to "$words".

The first solution did indeed delete my entire line, but the second option just crashes the script :(. This is what fails:

sub clean {
my ($words) = @_;
print "WordsBefore: $words \n";
$word =~ s/<[^>]+>//g;
print "WordsAfter: $words \n";
return $words;
}
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How exactly is it "crashing your script"? Is it providing any error message? Any output?

Edit:   I just noticed that you're passing "$words", but then operating on "$word", which is probably your error. Granted you probably cut and paste what I wrote (so the error is actually mine -- sorry!). Change "$word" to "$words".

You should also have:

    use strict;
    use warnings;
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at the top of your script (maybe you do, and that's why your script was failing). If not, add them; they'll tell you what you're doing wrong in exactly this type of situation.
say  substr+lc crypt(qw $i3 SI$),4,5

G'day luxlunae,

This matches your requirements :-)

#!/usr/bin/env perl -l

use strict;
use warnings;

my $html = '<span class="author-name" itemprop="author">Romaxton</span
+>';
my $re = qr{<[^>]+>([^<]*)<[^>]+>};

print "The idea is to reduce:\n", $html;
$html =~ s/$re/$1/;
print "to\n", $html;
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Output:

The idea is to reduce:
<span class="author-name" itemprop="author">Romaxton</span>
to
Romaxton
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<span class="author-name" itemprop="author">Romaxton</span>
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s/<[^>]+(\w+)/$1/;
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That doesn't actually work:

c:\@Work\Perl>perl -wMstrict -le
"my $s = '<span class=\"author-name\" itemprop=\"author\">Romaxton</sp
+an>';
 ;;
 $s =~ s/<[^>]+(\w+)/$1/;
 print qq{'$s'};
"
'r">Romaxton</span>'
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Yes, you are right. I was not in a position to test when I posted and I missed parts of it. I was thinking about something like this (assuming the string is in $_):

s/<[^>]+>(\w+).*/$1/;
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which does work, but there are actually some easier ways, such as:

print $1 if />(\w+)</;
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