Geeee! at last I read all the way down to the bottom until I saw it. Indeed, TIMTOWTDI is the answer to the regex question. Shame on some of you other folk, who while accumulating perl wisdom seem to have forgotten the first lesson.
Comment on Re: Re: A few random questions from Learning Perl 3
There is more than one way to do it right, but there are lots of ways to do it wrong.
Parsing HTML with regexes falls into the latter category.
Using a regex can be one of the right ways to do it if you are parsing a pseudo-HTML format which is not allowed to have nesting beyond a very shallow depth in the portions you actually want to parse.