I'm a big fan of HTML::TokeParser for this sort of data extraction work ...

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use HTML::TokeParser;
use strict;

my $html = '<a href="/f1/show?page=matchup&lid=206&week=8&mid1=2&mid2=
+8">\n';

my @results;
my $parser = HTML::TokeParser->new(\$html) || die $!;
while (my $token = $parser->get_token) {
    my $type = shift @{ $token };
    if ($type eq "S") {
        my ($tag, $attr, $attrseq, $text) = @{ $token };
        if (($tag eq "a") && ($attr->{'href'} =~ /^\/f1\/show\?/i)) {
            my $a_href = $attr->{'href'};
            $a_href =~ s/.+\?//g;
            my %vars = map { ((split(/=/, $_))[0]) => ((split(/=/, $_)
+)[1]) } split(/&/, $a_href);
            push (@results, \%vars);
        };
    };
};

foreach my $vars (@results) {
    print $_, " ", ${$vars}{$_}, "\n" foreach keys %{$vars};
};

exit 0;
[download]

This code also checks to ensure that the href of the anchor matches what we want (eg. /f1/show) and allows for multiple matches in the HTML. Also too, if you are to extract this data from live web pages, the assignment of $html can easily be replaced with something similar to this:

use LWP::Simple;

my $html = get('http://url.to.webpage.com/');
die "LWP::Simple failed to retrieve source HTML - $!" unless ($html);
[download]

There has also been a tutorial written on this module here by crazyinsomniac which includes an excellent step-by-step example for building a program based on HTML::TokeParser.

 

Ooohhh, Rob no beer function well without!