aritst

Agreed. When working on code for heavy use, don't reinvent the wheel.

For learning purposes, though, you don't want (\w*) for the maximum number of consecutive word characters, you want (.*?) for the minimum number of characters followed by the closing quote.

--
[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]

Actually, this is a good example of when .*? is not the best choice. [^"]* is a much better idea. You don't want to run into this problem:

    $page= '<a href="foo">...'
      . '<a href="bar" title="baz"><b>Click Here';
    $page =~ /<a href="(.*?)" title="(.*?)"><b>Click Here/i;
[download]

where $1 will contain 'foo">...<a href="bar'.
                - tye

use strict;
use warnings;

use URI::Find; 

my @found;

# this is just for this example, your $page will have the HTML
# this line slurps the DATA filehandle below into a scalar
my $page = do {local $/;<DATA>};

my $finder = URI::Find->new(
    sub { push @found,shift }
);

$finder->find(\$page);
print $_,$/ for @found;

__DATA__
<a href="http://foo.com/bar/qux.html">stuff</a>
<a href="http://bar.com/baz.cgi?foo=bar&stuff=more%20stuff">click</a>
<a href="mailto:spam@me.com">don't feed the trolls</a>
[download]

jeffa

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)

Don't use $1 unless you are absolutely sure the match succeeded.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

As artist implies, there are more well-thought-out solutions to this particular problem than you can shake a stick at.

*If*, however, you're doing this purely as an learning exercise {g}, then you're correct - "\w" matches *only* alphanumerics and '_' - "http://" will throw it for instance. "." matches anything...you could use that, or a character class ('[\w:\/-]*' or something) to match only the characters that you want.

If you use "." though, be warned that "*" is 'greedy' - if your page contains more than one '" TITLE=""><b>Click Here' , then ".*" will grab a whole lot more than you bargained for...you'll probably want to make it ".*?" - the "?" makes it 'minimal'.

Hope this clarifies things,
Cheers, Ben.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use LWP::Simple;
use HTML::LinkExtor;
use Data::Dumper;

my $content = get("http://www.yandex.ru"); #Get web page
die "Get web page failed!" unless defined $content;

my $parser = HTML::LinkExtor->new(); #create LinkExtor object 
$parser->parse($content); #parse content
my @links = $parser->links; #get list of links

print Dumper (\@links);  #print list of links
[download]

      
--------------------------------
SV* sv_bless(SV* sv, HV* stash);