in reply to Re: Regex grabs too much
in thread Regex grabs too much

It sould like you could express what you want as follows:
If one of my special (~ ... ~) tags is found inside an HTML tag, replace that whole HTML tag with my special tag. Otherwise leave it alone.
In that case the following code should do the trick: 
$data =~ s/<[^<>]*?(\(~ .*? ~\))[^<>]*?>/$1/g;

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comment added in response to the following message

[^<>]

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That is a character-class consisting of not > or <. The perlre documentation has more details on how this works. My RE works by looking for the opening < of an HTML tag, then 0 or more non < > characters, then the special tag, then 0 or more non < > characters, then the > that closes the original HTML tag.

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RE: RE: Re: Regex grabs too much
by raflach (Pilgrim) on Jun 05, 2000 at 21:02 UTC
    That worked perfectly! Can you explain what 
    [^<>]

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    actually is doing? That seems to be the only difference between your code and mine, and it confuses me considerably.
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[d/l]
      It means "not one of those two characters"

      viva el perl libre

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      I am not an lhoward and I do not play one on TV, but I can explain that bit of regex.

      lhoward has defined a set, as indicated by the [ ]. When perl's regex engine sees this, anything within the brackets will be considered a match. However, lhoward was tricky and made the first character a ^. When the first character of set is a ^, it negates the set ( mathematicians call it the complement, but I can't spell 'complement' ) and tells the regex to match everything but what is in the set. 

      [^<>]

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      is saying to match anything that isn't a < or a >

      HTH,
      mikfire

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[d/l]

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