hi there I have some data in the format (a credit card statement) , and I've been trying to adapt a google-posted perl script to parse the data into a qif file for import into microsoft money. 
<tr><td bgcolor='#DCDCDC' align='left' width='100'><font face='arial,h
+elvetica' size='-2'>&nbsp;28 Jun 2001</font></td><td bgcolor='#DCDCDC
+'
+ align='left' width='300'><font face='arial,helvetica' size='-2'>&nbs
+p
+;HMV UK LTD              NOTTINGHAM    GB</font></td><td bgcolor='#DC
+D
+CDC' align='right' width='75'><font face='arial,helvetica' size='-2'>
+&
+pound;10.99 &nbsp;</font></td></tr><tr><td bgcolor='#DCDCDC' align='l
+e
+ft' width='100'><font face='arial,helvetica' size='-2'>&nbsp;28 Jun 2
+0
+01</font></td><td bgcolor='#DCDCDC' align='left' width='300'><font fa
+c
+e='arial,helvetica' size='-2'>&nbsp;MARKS   SPENCER         NOTTINGHA
+M
+ 06 GB</font></td><td bgcolor='#DCDCDC' align='right' width='75'><fon
+t
+ face='arial,helvetica' size

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and I want to find certain tags using this code snippet, and output a qif file. The problem I'm having is in matching the start and end tags. 
$start="<td bgcolor=\'#DCDCDC\' align=\'left\' width=\'300\'><font fac
+e='arial,helvetica' size='-2'>&nbsp;";
$end="</font></td>";
while (<>)
  {
    if (/$start(.*?)$end/g)
      {
    print "\n\n\nDOODAH:".$1."\n";
      }
  }

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It never seems to match the start tag, and if I change the start tag to something simpler like 
$start="<td bgcolor";

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then the perl never seems to stop when it hits something that matches the $end var. I've been going round and round this and I just can't figure it out, so any advice would be greatly appreciated. Cheers moonlord

In reply to html tag matching confusion by moonlord

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