Hi there, I agree with davorg. If they change the format of their page, the script will break horribly. Regardless, I wrote a test script that does the same thing as yours, pretty much. I just broke it up into smaller steps. 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use LWP::Simple;

use constant URL => 'http://spanish.about.com/homework/spanish/blword.
+htm';

my $today = (localtime)[3];
my $page = get(URL) or die "can't download page.\n";

# grab today's entry.
my($entry) = $page =~ m/if \(day == $today\) [^\(]+\(\"([^\"\);]+)/;

# remove markup.
$entry =~ s/<[^>]+>//g;

my($word,$def, $sentence, $trans) = $entry =~ m/([^:]+):([^\.]+\.)([^,
+]+),(.*)/;

print "word: $word\n";
print "definition: $def\n";
print "sentence: $sentence\n";
print "translation: $trans\n";

[download]

In reply to Re: Patern matching html. by rpc
in thread Patern matching html. by zzspectrez

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.