This example from the documentation for HTML::TokeParser:

use HTML::TokeParser;
  $p = HTML::TokeParser->new(shift||"index.html");

  while (my $token = $p->get_tag("a")) {
      my $url = $token->[1]{href} || "-";
      my $text = $p->get_trimmed_text("/a");
      print "$url\t$text\n";
  }
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And what it does is, "...extracts all links from a document. It will print one line for each link, containing the URL and the textual description between the <A>...</A> tags..."

Thanks - that's exactly what I need.

HTML::TokeParser (or ::Simple) and/or HTML::TreeBuilder can do this easily.

Thank you very much!

#!/usr/bin/perl

while(<DATA>) {
    m#<A.*?HREF=(?:'|")?(.[^\'\"]+)(?:'|")?(?:\s.+)?>(.*?)</A>#ig;
    print "URL: $1\nName: $2\n\n";
}

__END__
   <A HREF=?ad=049>One</A>
   <A HREF=?ad=050>Two</A>
<a target='_new' href='foo'>foo --> bar</a>
<a target='_new' href='boo'>blah</a>
<a target='_new' href=bar>troz</a>
<a target='_new' href=bar2 onclick='somefunc'>troz</a>
<a target='_new' href='bar3' onclick='somefunc'>troz</a>
[download]

I downvoted this because it doesn't actually work on html. It's a good try, but there are several cases it just misses, for example:

<a href='this>breaks>"'>maybe</a>
<a href=#>test</a>
<a href="/path/to/don't/use/this">omg</a>
[download]

(The second two are credited two perlygatekeeper in #perl on Freenode)

Your code produces:

URL: this>breaks
Name: "'>maybe

URL: #>
Name:  

URL: "/
Name:
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I'm sure you could manage to fix these specific cases, but I seriously doubt you'll ever actually get to the point where it parses every type of valid html. And even if you do, whats the point? You just wasted X hours to do something that existing modules already do extremely well. This makes a decent learning exercise but please to not suggest "home grown" regexen for such complicated tasks.

well it worked on his examples :) What's the point? the point is to try and reinvent the wheel. Why would I want to reinvent the wheel? why not, if I'm getting paid :) then I learn things too, such as the mistakes you pointed out.

Of course, I was working under the assumption that the links are valid html, of which none of the examples you nor the thread author provided are. Anything not matching [a-zA-Z0-9], such as quotes, anglebrackets,etc. should be urlencoded if put in a url.

in any case, you're right it's still broken for some cases. downvote away :)

I have a simple example for the v1 HTML::Parser here

/J\

   <A HREF=?ad=049>One</A>
   <A HREF=?ad=050>Two</A>
[download]

Standard acceptable HTML will need to quote those attribute values.