To chime in with the others, you shouldn't parse HTML by hand. There's so much possible variation that you can't possibly get it right in any reasonable timeframe with simple methods (like a couple regexen). Your problem that a tag may span multiple lines is just one of a myriad of cases. You may soon run across a case where the name you're looking for is two lines down from the start of the tag; then you'll have to readjust everything all over. Save yourself the headache of writing a parser and your users the headache of working with a simpleminded one, and just use the appropriate modules.

To answer your question though, it's simply a matter of keeping a copy of the current line around, and going through the file line by line.

my $buffer = <FH>;

my $line;
while(<FH>) {
    $buffer .= $line = $_;

    # ..
    # ..

    $buffer = $line;
}

[download]

Makeshifts last the longest.

In reply to Re: html parsing by Aristotle
in thread html parsing by Anonymous Monk

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.