Not a Perl solution, but i use it in conjunction with Perl all the time, is HTML Area. It turns a text box into a WYSIWYG HTML editor. It was written exactly for problems like yours. ;)

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)

That's good. I wish I knew about perlmonks.org when I first started. Already you are on good footing.

Woaah nelly! You mean to say you are 1)learning perl; and 2)writing a new language intended to 'simplify' HTML; and 3)unleashing this new language on office workers; and 4)writing a parser for this language yourself by hand using Regular Expressions; and 5)learning Regular Expressions along the way? Please realize that such a multi-faceted plan of attack, even if not done simultaneously, smells like "biting off more than he could chew" ... This is a huge red flag.

I could use some direction......

If you really want advice on your "new simpler-than HTML" language, let others comment on that ... but you might want to explain a little more clearly what the syntax of your 'language' is, and then consider already-available options, like XML, YAML, or some other thing where you do not have to both invent the language and invent the parser yourself.

As far as advice ... (my two cents) save the perl project for your own personal exploration, and give the office workers who cannot learn HTML a 'fill in the blank' style form. You can use a Spreadsheet, or a Web-Based form, or a program like Filemaker or MSFT Access to get the information from them. Then if you really want, you can use Perl to pretty-fy the user input into HTML or whatever else strikes your fancy.

a) You can't parse arbitrary (HT|SG|X)ML with just regular expressions; you need a full blown parser. Your approach is pretty much doomed to failure to begin with.

b) You'd probably be better served as a learning experience using one of the already existing templating solutions (TT2, Mason, one of the wiki formatters; see Template, HTML::Mason, Text::WikiFormat) than attempting to roll your own from scratch.

I will note, however, that the main problem I see in this regex is the unescaped front slashes, "/", which should be written "\/" when they're inside the regex. Also (correct me if I'm wrong I'm not so good at regex myself), doesn't * include 0 instances of a character, making the ? unnecessary?

LassiLantar

Or you could use something other than / for your delimiters, if you're going to have a lot of slashes in your patterns. For instance,

$text =~ s!(.*?)<link=(".*?")>(.*?)</link>!$1<a ref=$2>$3</a>!gi;
[download]

would work. Additionally, there's no need for the first match, so it could just be

$text =~ s!<link=(".*?")>(.*?)</link>!<a ref=$2>$3</a>!gi;
[download]

As for the ?, it is meaningful. *? is a non-greedy match. But in general, I agree with the others that the whole attempt could be an interesting playpen for learning, but really shouldn't be attempted seriously.

Ignoring the ill-advised venture of parsing HTML with regular expressions, the following is a reduced version of your code that works better. You really only need to replace small <link> tags, not the entire text every time.

  $text =~ s/<link=("[^"]*")>(.*?)<\/link>/<a href=$1>$2/gi;
[download]

Update: Code improved - thank you Eimi Metamorphoumai.

But that doesn't accurately replace the closing </link> tags with </a>.

Oops - thanks for pointing that out. I was careless.