(Please surround your code with CODE tags to keep it readable.)

If you just want to de-HTMLify a document, the fastest way I know of doing it would be to run it through lynx -dump. This even gives you a bit of formatting.

If you really need to overwrite tags with spaces, and in the proper amount, then your approach of making a pattern first and then using it is not bad, but you're making two mistakes. First, you're only making a string, not a compiled regexp. You can very easily fix that by changing your first statement to:

my $pattern = qr/  ...whatever was here before...  /;

Secondly, you are doing the work twice: first you just match for tags, then you substitute. Don't do that.

1 while $target_data =~ s/$pattern/' ' x length $1/ge;

(This is not tested! At all!)

Finally, don't use regexps to parse HTML. Use an HTML::Parser.

In reply to Re: Stripping HTML tags efficiently by gaal
in thread Stripping HTML tags efficiently by agynr

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