Getting a chunk of an HTML string?

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

So I'm trying to write a script that automatically grabs a random quote from the IMDB site. I know that the format of the random quote page is always

    ...page goes for a while...
  <h1>Random Movie Quote</h1>
    ...quote goes here...
  <P><form method=get action="/Games/randomquote.html">
    ...and page keeps going...

I get the site using LWP::Simple's get() command, and store it in a scalar. I then try to regexp the scalar, by saying

$content =~ s#.*<h1>Random Movie Quote</h1>(.*)<P><form method=get act
+ion="/Games/randomquote.html">.*#$1#;
[download]

which I assumed would get the quote, which is always in between those two strings. However, it always grabs the entire $content string back again. I assume this means it couldn't find a match, but I'm not sure. Any helpful hints? What's the stupendously obvious thing I'm overlooking? (I did try searching the archives and didn't find anything helpful)

Comment on Getting a chunk of an HTML string? Download Code

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Re: Getting a chunk of an HTML string? by wog (Curate) on Oct 13, 2001 at 03:56 UTC
Your problem is a result of `.` matching every character but newline, except if the `/s` option is used. See perlre for more details. Fixing this morphs your code into: `$content =~ s#.<h1>Random Movie Quote</h1>(.)<P><form method=get act +ion="/Games/randomquote.html">.#$1#s;` [download] However, for extracting a string from some text, you are better off matching and just using the extracted string, rather then trying to substitute out everything else in one step: `if ($content =~ m#<h1>Random Movie Quote</h1>(.)<P><form method=get a +ction="/Games/randomquote.html>#s) $content = $1; # we matched, replace $content with $1. # though it might be clearer to put it # in a different variable. } else { # we didn't match, complain. }` [download] (Note that similarly you can check the return value of `s///` to see if a substitution actually took place.)	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Re: Getting a chunk of an HTML string? by tommyw (Hermit) on Oct 13, 2001 at 04:08 UTC
As well as perlre, there's a specific faq: I'm having trouble matching over more than one line. What's wrong?	[reply]
Re: Getting a chunk of an HTML string? by thatguy (Parson) on Oct 13, 2001 at 04:04 UTC
it would also be benefical to check out Death to Dot Star! by Ovid as well as the Tutorials section.good examples, principles and exercises to build your regex skillz. -phill	[reply]