Hello.

I'm trying to parse and HTML file that has many nested tags like <div> or <span>.

When I try this simple test:

#!perl
$a = 'A<div>B<div>C</div>D</div>E';
$a =~ m%<div>(.*?)</div>%;
print "=$1=\n";

[download]

the result is =B<div>C= instead of just =C=.

If I change (.*?) with (.*), the result is =B<div>C</div>D= as expected.

What is going on with the not greedy regexpr?

Is there a way to extract only the inner string?

Please note that capital letters from my example represent any HTML string, with other tags included.

In reply to regular expression and nested tags by vitoco

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


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