Regexes can work just fine for extracting predictable information from almost any sort of data stream. Perl has a very large collection of pre-written regex patterns (in CPAN) which can often let you "get straight to the point." But, when you do not know in advance the structure of what you have been given, but you really need to do things that are dependent on structure and location, then there's nothing better than "a true, feature-complete battle-tested parser." Of which Perl offers more than one. Seriously, "surf through CPAN first." No matter what it is you are doing, someone has already done it very well. The Perl language has one of the best and most diverse user-source-code libraries available anywhere.

In reply to Re: Why a regex *really* isn't good enough for HTML, even for "simple" tasks by Anonymous Monk
in thread Why a regex *really* isn't good enough for HTML and XML, even for "simple" tasks by haukex

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.