The tricky part is separating the generic name from dosage, since the HTML markup won't help with that. If you want everything from the first numeric character to the closing </h3>, this will do it:

if ($line =~ /<h3>(.*?)(\d.*)<\/h3>/) { print "Generic name is: $1 \n\t Dosage is:$2\n"; }

But like ww says above, be *really* sure that the data are consistent. There will probably be some special cases that don't start with a number or have something else wrong with them, just to give you a headache

Edit: for the op: I used "*?" (minimal match quantifier) instead of "*" to match the name-- "*" by itself will match all the way up to the closing tag, but with the "?" modifier it only matches as much as it needs to to satisfy the match.

Another edit: ww reminded me of something I thought of when I was typing a reply that I accidentally closed before posting-- you might want to get a separate list of generic names without the additional information, so you can isolate those from the records you're dismantling. This may be what you're trying to generate though...


In reply to Re^2: parsing a line with $1, $2, $3 by bitingduck
in thread parsing a line with $1, $2, $3 by kevyt

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.