I like kilinrax use of reverse, I have never seen that trick before.
Without knowing that I would have suggested a capturing regex,
sort of a modification of the greedy suggestion.

It benchmarks the fastest of the three. 

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use strict;
use Benchmark;

my $string = "<<HTML>;nbsp dont_strip_me</HTML>> <xyzfdgfghgf> ;strip_
+me";

sub reversed {
  my $reverse = reverse(shift);
  $reverse =~ s| \w* ; \s* > |>|x;
  return scalar reverse $reverse;
}

sub greedy {
  my $line = shift;
  $line =~ s|^ (.*>) \s* ; \w* |$1|x;
  return $line;
}

sub capture
{
    my $line = shift;
    return $line =~ /^(.+>)/;
}

print "Reversed: ", reversed($string), "\n";
print "Greedy: ", greedy($string), "\n";
print "Capture: ", capture($string), "\n";

timethese( -10,{
                reversed => sub { reversed( $string ) },
                greedy => sub { greedy( $string ) },
                capture => sub { capture( $string ) },
               } );

[download]
Output: 
:!./test.pl
Reversed: <<HTML>;nbsp dont_strip_me</HTML>> <xyzfdgfghgf>
Greedy: <<HTML>;nbsp dont_strip_me</HTML>> <xyzfdgfghgf>
Capture: <<HTML>;nbsp dont_strip_me</HTML>> <xyzfdgfghgf>
Benchmark: running capture, greedy, reversed, each for at least 10 CPU
+ seconds...
   capture: 10 wallclock secs (10.40 usr +  0.01 sys = 10.41 CPU) @ 53
+160.52/s (n=553401)
    greedy: 10 wallclock secs (10.52 usr +  0.00 sys = 10.52 CPU) @ 21
+887.07/s (n=230252)
  reversed: 11 wallclock secs (10.54 usr +  0.01 sys = 10.55 CPU) @ 36
+366.92/s (n=383671)

[download]

Wonko

In reply to Re: parsing question by Wonko the sane
in thread parsing question by Washie101

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