minixman has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

All i have an HTML file being parsed back to my script.... and i am trying to search for certain lines in the file which look like this 
<p>

 ;Town<p>
 ;London ;

<p>

[download]
so when i do a search ie "$line =~ /Town/ ", how do i print the value London a the printf statement, or is there a way to join the two lines and print the second value

edited: Thu May 13 15:01:56 2004 by jeffa - code tags (not sure if the <p> tags were intentional though ...)

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: HTML Formattting
by Tomte (Priest) on May 13, 2004 at 09:38 UTC

    Update: Ah, I see, then look at grab only if pattern matches previous line, there are a bunch of solutions to your problem.

    I really don't understand, what you're trying to do, but for what I understand, the follwing should work (untested, I simply assume you want capturing parenthesis in your regexp): 

    my $test = ";Town ; London;";
if ($test =~ /Town ;([^;]+);/) {
    print $1; # $1 contains 'London '
}

    [download]

    regards,
    tomte

    An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
    -- Albert Camus

[reply]
[d/l]
      Sorry ,

      Well the html file that comes back to my program lets say test.html has certain entries like location country etc...

      so the file looks like this ;Cost Center Desc.
      ;FX IT EFX;

      ;Town
      ;London ;

      So what i want to do is search for town, and then grab the answer of the next line..

      Something like $line =~ /Town/ , and the answer i am looking for is the next line which is London. You see these came from a table in html format, and i stripped out the html so i just have text, so this is what i am left with.. 

      #!/home/cuthbe/bin/perl

open(T,"test.html") || die ("Unable to open file. $!\n");
foreach (<T>) {
        s/<[^>]+>//g;
        s/&nbsp//g;
        s/<!//g;
        if($_ =~ /Town/) { printf $$; }
        #printf;
}

      [download]

      Edited by Chady -- added code tags.

[reply]
[d/l]

        How about something like this:

        open(T,"test.html") || die ("Unable to open file. $!\n");
while(<T>) {
# preprocessing with s/.../ as above
    if (/^;Town/) {
        $town = <T>;
        chomp $town;
        $town =~ s/;//g;
        print "Found a town: $town\n";
    }
}

        [download]

        Note, I've only tested this very quickly. It could probably do with better error handling etc...

[reply]
[d/l]

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