Substringing HTML content

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

Hi there,

I have got a question,
say, I have some HTML content.
My problem is, how do I substring the content to generate a preview of x letters of the pure text with leaving the markup structure fully functioning?

I tried to strip the tags, then substr my wanted length, and then I tried a make up a regexp to do the same to the HTML thing, but of course wouldn't work.

Thanks for your help.
ur right, sorry, okay:
eg, I have got this:

<b>bla blub</b><i>this</i> <br>is the content I want to extract</i> bu
+t only some <span style="background:#ccc">part of it</span>
[download]

Now I want to provide a preview like that:

<b>bla blub</b><i>this <br>is the content I want to extract</i>but   -
+> more?
[download]

if I just did substr($content,0,40) I would get something like:

<b>bla blub</b><i>this <br>is the content I want t
[download]

and you see that the HTML markup is broken, which I would like not to have.

Comment on Substringing HTML content Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Substringing HTML content by William G. Davis (Friar) on Jan 07, 2005 at 17:56 UTC
HTML::Filter or one of the other HTML::Parser modules might help.	[reply]
Re: Substringing HTML content by fuzzysteve (Beadle) on Jan 07, 2005 at 18:40 UTC
While it's messy as hell, as an interim solution, write a subroutine that goes though it character by character which records the following things: total characters so far if you are in a tag (i.e. started with a <) what the last character was how many tags you are in how many open tags there are (img could be problematic with this. ditto on any other atomic tags. xhtml would be easier) what the open tags are and what order they are in from that you should be able to run through the characters, taking note of all the tags that you'll need to close at the end. not fun, and hopefully theres a better solution.	[reply]
Re^2: Substringing HTML content by eternius (Beadle) on Jan 07, 2005 at 20:41 UTC
thanks :) ah crap, I got rid of the whole idea I now use a div width a fixed height and overflow:hidden. have a good day	[reply]
Re: Substringing HTML content by dimar (Curate) on Jan 07, 2005 at 17:54 UTC
It would help if you could explain a little more what you are trying to do. For example, Are you are attempting to show Keyword In Context (KWIC) results from an HTML search engine? If so, you may want to look at a premade tool like GLIMPSE.	[reply]