I understand your point, but the following will break your regex:

<TD class="foo"> # you don't allow for attributes
<td>             # you assumed upper-case
<TD              # it's annoying, but legal, to have a newline there
>

[download]

If the last example seems contrived, I can assure you that it's not. I've had the misfortune of dealing with HTML written like that :) Further, that's the example which pretty much guarantees that no tweaks to your regex will handle that case. Sad, but true.

If it makes you feel any better, you can get an idea of the scope of the problem of using regular expressions with HTML by reading about my sordid history making the same darned mistake.

Cheers,
Ovid

Update: chicks has updated the original code snippet so that my comments and those of Mr. Muskrat don't appear to make sense. I think it would have been appropriate for chicks to make note of that. The original snippet resembled the following (I can't recall it exactly):

    $content =~ s/^(?!\s*<TD>).*$//mg;

[download]

Join the Perlmonks Setiathome Group or just click on the the link and check out our stats.

In reply to Re: Re: Re: kill all lines that don't start with something by Ovid
in thread kill all lines that don't start with something by chicks

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.