Hello there. I would like to ask help in selecting and formatting the first word of every line of an MS Word Document. What I planned to do is to first save the file as an HTML document, then use Perl to select the first word of every line and place <B> </B> tag-pair around it, then copy and paste the correctly-formatted view from my web browser back into MS Word.

A portion of the html-converted document can be downloaded from below.

Sample Document

I've been trying to make a perl script that looks for a pattern starting with <P> tag followed by HTML tags, if any, then a non-HTML tag text sequence. If the pattern was found, it'll look for a white-space character which is not within an HTML tag (i.e. <>) delimiters. The non-HTML tag character sequence until the white-space character should be enclosed in <B> and <</B> tags

I've made a code for this, but it isn't completely working. Hope someone helps and thanks in advance.

Here's my code 
while(<>){
    chomp;
    $line = $_;
    $line =~ s/(<P[^<]*>)( |<[^<]*>)*(\s*)([^\s<>]+)([^\s]|<[^<]*>)*(\
+s)(.*?<\/P[^<]*>)/$1 $2 $3 <B>$4 <\/B> $5 $6 $7/g;
    print "$line\n";
}

[download]

In reply to changing format of the first word of every line in an HTML doc by sharkyflip

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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