I ask for any and all monks whose knowledge of regular expressions exceeds my own to help me optimize this regex.
Optimize for speed or readability the choice is yours. I am parsing computer generated, badly formatted, HTML which has a number of lines that look like this 
<tr>
<td width="0" align="center"><font face="Arial" size="2">29022</font>
</td><td width="0" align="center"><font face="Arial" size="2">01</font
+>
</td><td width="0" align="center"><font face="Arial" size="2">354</fon
+t>
</td><td width="0" align="center"><font face="Arial" size="2">201</fon
+t>
</td><td width="0" align="center"><font face="Arial" size="2">01</font
+>
</td><td width="0" align="center"><font face="Arial" size="2">&nbsp;</
+font>
</td><td align="center"><font face="Arial" size="2">INTRODUCTION TO FI
+LM</font>
</td><td align="center"><font face="Arial" size="2"> 3</font>
</td><td align="center"><font face="Arial" size="2">MW5M7,8</font>
</td><td align="center"><font face="Arial" size="2">MI-100</font>
</td><td align="center"><font face="Arial" size="2">&nbsp;</font>
</td></tr>

[download]
The first piece of data is always 5 digits, the second 2, the third 3, the fourth 3, the fifth 2, the sixth a $nbsp or a single letter, the seventh an unspecified number of words, the eigth a single space followed by a digit, the ninth will always have 1 letter and then will either be another letter followed by a number or two numbers (that will possibly be followed by another similar set, as shown above), the tenth will always be letters followed by a dash and then some numbers or letters, and finally the eleventh can be ignored.

I am currently using /^<tr.*?(\d\d\d\d\d).*?<td.*?>(\d\d).*?<td.*?>(\d\d\d).*?<td.*?>(\d\d\d).*?<td.*?>(\d\d).*?<td\.*?>(?:&).*?<td.*?>(\w+(?:(?:\s\w+)?)*).*?<td.*?>(\s\d).*?<td.*?>(\w(?:(?:[\w\d,])?)*).*?<td.*?>(\w(?:\(?:[\w\d-])?)*)/ to pull out the relevant pieces of information. Any advice would be appreciated.

-Etan

P.S. Oh and if possible some slight explanation would be useful. I understand the basics of regex but flags and oddities still escape me. Thanks in advance.

P.P.S I had been checking for both the <td> and <font> tags but then read this node and realized that I was asking for too much. So I stopped asking for the font tags. Just thought I'd throw that in to put my thought processes up for inspection.

In reply to Regex optimization by deryni

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.