in reply to Problem with parsing HTML with Regex's

Without a sample line that is going wrong, this is just a shot in the dark, but does replacing each .*? with [^=]* and putting \b before and after img, a, and link help?

You really ought to be doing this with HTML::Parser.

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Re: Re: Problem with parsing HTML with Regex's
by Anonymous Monk on Nov 10, 2003 at 07:58 UTC
    Without a sample line that is going wrong, this is just a shot in the dark, but does replacing each .*? with ^=* and putting \b before and after img, a, and link help?
    [^=]* is not much better than .*?. "A" is not "=", "B" is not "=", "C" is not "=", "D" is not "=", .... Since he's parsing html, he should replace .*? with \s* (regular expressions are easy to write if you know precisely what you're matching).
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      But who's to say that the input will always look like "img src...", it could be "img border" or anything like that.
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Re: Re: Problem with parsing HTML with Regex's
by OverlordQ (Hermit) on Nov 10, 2003 at 07:39 UTC
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      Try: 
      s#(?:\bimg\b[^<>]*src|\blink\b[^<>]*href)\=\"(.*?)\"#...

and

s#(?:\ba\b[^<>]*href)\=\"(.*?)\"#

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      (diotalevi's solution may be a better place to start, adjusting the .+ to not allow intervening tags.)

      Or you may want to follow this suggestion; I had assumed you wanted to cover even something like <a title="whoohoo" href=...>, so I didn't switch to \s*.

      But given that you want to be able to handle *any* web page that is entered, you ought to use a real html parser instead. (BTW, I tried http://google.com and was disappointed that the buttons didn't get translated.)

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