First off, <A HREF="http://www.cnn.com/WEATHER/index.html"> isn't an url. Its the open element of an Anchor tag. If you are trying to skip anchor tags based on the url then I wouldnt try to match a full tag, (think of all the possible other attrbutes a tag can have which will make the match fail), but rather the url within the tag (even then I wonder... Have a look at HTML::LinkExtor for other ideas.)

The below will print "matches".

my $str='<A HREF="http://www.cnn.com/WEATHER/index.html">';

print "matches!" if $str=~m!href\s*=\s*\Q['"]http://www.cnn.com/WEATHE
+R/index.html['"]\E!i;

[download]

If this is part of some regex based HTML parser then I suggest you look into using HTML::Parser or its more useful (but greedy) child class, HTML::TreeBuilder. Frankly I would use modules like that becuase the intracacies of HTML make it difficult to parse properly with regexen.

update: thanks to the CB for some HTML clarifications while writing this.

Yves / DeMerphq
---
Software Engineering is Programming when you can't. -- E. W. Dijkstra (RIP)

In reply to Re: matching a Url by demerphq
in thread matching a Url 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.