Open, Find, Replace, Rewrite, Close.. Advice on best path to take

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

I am a relative perl novice so my apologies if I'm asking a really simple question. Your advice is greatly appreciated. I'm tyring to figure out the best way to do the following: open an html file and replace any and all text between a set of span tags with information passed from a form field. I tried to do it via subsitution but my regex skills are pretty weak and it doesn't work. i would like to do it without having to install any custom modules if possible. the span tags in the html file look like this:

<span id=editArea name="whatever">
bla bla a bunch of html and text that will change from file to file
</span>
[download]

Any wisdom the breathern wish to bestow up me is greatly appreciated. Thanks

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Re: Open, Find, Replace, Rewrite, Close.. Advice on best path to take by gav^ (Curate) on Feb 14, 2002 at 16:30 UTC
Parsing HTML with regexps is error prone. HTML::Parser, HTML::TreeBuilder, etc are great tools. Here is a short example: `my $str = q{ <span id=editArea name="whatever"> bla bla a bunch of html and text that will change from file to file </span> }; use HTML::TreeBuilder; my $t = HTML::TreeBuilder->new_from_content($str); foreach ($t->look_down('_tag', 'span')) { next if $_->attr('id') ne 'editArea' \|\| $_->attr('name') ne 'whate +ver'; $_->delete_content; $_->push_content('this is some replacement text'); } print $t->as_HTML; $t->delete;` [download] gav^	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Open, Find, Replace, Rewrite, Close.. Advice on best path to take by rdfield (Priest) on Feb 14, 2002 at 16:13 UTC
I guess there'll be quite a few answers to this but here's my attempt: `$newtext = "some new text"; $spantext =~ s/(\<span[^>]+\>)[^<]+(<.>)/$1${newtext}$2/i; #assuming there's no tags between the spans...` [download] rdfield update* running `$_='7065726c646f63207065726c7265';system pack"H*",$_` [download] might help too :)	[reply] [d/l] [select]