It seems like everyone would like some background. I thought it was orthagonal to my objective and so ommitted it, but, apparently it's not, so here it is.

I'm working on adding code to an (already working) mailing list converter. The converter converts emails to html, suitable for use in archives. Some features that I would like to add are: to get rid of whitespace at the end (easy), HTML whitepsace (medium), and trailing blockquotes (quite hard).

The email is already stored locally in a file, and is converted to a variable in memory. By end of the file, I simply mean the last byte (character for those of us who speak Unicode) of the variable. The </body> etc tags will be added on later.

The emails will be coming from a variety of sources and lists. The one I posted above is simply an example, but I can't count on its specifics.

The html shoul be well formed, with the understanding that the <body>and</body> tags will be left out. There should be no tables or anything - it should really be more or less straight text, with simple markup - as you would find in an email sent as text/html. Again, by "end" I only mean the end of the variable.

I hope I've provided everything that you've asked - if not, please let me know.
And I hope someone here has some ideas, since I'm stumped, specifically on the last one (removing (possibly nested blockquotes)).

PS Yes I realize that regex should never be used for real html, they can get confused by html in comments, and whitespace or attributes in the middle of a tag, etc - I was only trying to give a simple example of why they were totally inadequate here. The code, as is, can already convert

In reply to Re^2: Using Perl to snip the end off of HTML by eastcoastcoder
in thread Using Perl to snip the end off of HTML by eastcoastcoder

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