Re: Using a Regex to parse into keys

Okay, putting aside the arguments that HTML is rarely well formed and that regexps aren't the answer when you can't guarantee the purity of your data etc (ie use HTML::Parser), an answer to your question is as follows:

$_ = qq{<html><foo>4~<font color="#FF0000"><b>,</b></font><fush>
        5~
        <fish>#555555<>6~    <font #444444>};

print "$_\n";
my %colours = (m!(\d+)~\s*<\s*font\s+[^#]*(#[A-F0-9]{6})!igs);

print $colours{4};  # will print #FF0000
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This code will handle (some cases where) '#' appears elsewhere and will ignore any case where the colour does not contain 6 hex digits. It's case insensitive, and allows spaces all over the place. I still hope that you have some idea of your expected data, as there are many cases that this can still break.

Hope it helps.

jarich

Update: mdillon pointed out a copy error. Was @colours, needed to be %colours.

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