No, you're absolutely right that HTML::Parser in and of itself wouldn't do a good job for this specific problem. My point in posting was really twofold:

• Writing a parser like this is very very difficult to get right, and usually it's better to find an existing tool that's already been stress-tested. You got it right because you know what you're doing, but I doubt many others would be able to execute like that.
• Ovid's initial problem, which apparently was the seed for your post, was tailor-made for HTML::Parser.

As far as functional programming goes, I'm not a stranger (I just recently replaced Perl code to walk two trees and find differences with compiled ML because it was faster and more conceptually simple), and I certainly support seeing more functional Perl. I'm not necessarily convinced that functional techniques helped in this particular program that much; my claim is that it worked so well because of the strength of the programmer. However, I do appreciate the elegance of the solution. But I continue to submit that your average Perl programmer would botch this problem subtly, and it would make more sense for them to use some pre-rolled solution.

-dlc

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