Hello monks,

Please forgive me for asking something that might be very simple. I have a string variable $form_dump that is bascially the output of $query->Dump; from a html form submit. So everything in the form is taken into this string variable, which is a multiline variable. The contents of it look like:

<ul>
<li><strong>site_user</strong></li>
<ul>
<li>user1</li>
</ul>
<li><strong>compare_hidden</strong></li>
<ul>
<li>average_speed_answer  25 60 30 60 ^M<br />
 calls_waiting  300 500 300 500 ^M<br />
 many more rows here
 post_ivr_calls_handled Wisconsin 50 100 50 100 ^M<br />
 post_ivr_calls_handled Wyoming 50 100 50 100 ^M<br />
</li>
<li><strong>calls_waiting_good_high</strong></li>
<ul>
<li>300</li>
</ul>
<li><strong>calls_waiting_warning_low</strong></li>
<ul>

[download]

What I am trying to do is to get each line between fourth pair of <li> & </li> and put those lines in an array. So far I have tried:

if ( $form_dump =~ m{(<li>)(.*?)(</li>)}s ) {
    my $inside_li = $2;
    print $fh "Value of \$inside_li: $inside_li \n";
}

[download]

This gives the text between first pair of <li> & </li> which is <strong>site_user</strong>.

Can I get some clues on how to skip the first three pairs of <li> & </li> and and then stop after text between fourth pair is pulled. I had tried something like $form_dump =~ m{(<li>)(^average_.*?)(</li>)}s in an attempt to get only that text which starts with "average_" but it doesn't match anything and $inside_li prints blank.

I am doing something wrong or missing something there.

Update: Updated subject line to mark solved.

In reply to [Solved]: Query about regular expression by Perl300

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