html regex problem

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

   push (@items, $1) while $saved_page =~ m#<\/a><br>(.+)?<br>\&nbsp\;
+<b>#g;
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Isn't working quite right. I change the (.+)? to (.*?) and it mathces 1 item, but it doens't match a lot of junk code like it does with my current code. It needs to match ALL items it finds.

The code I am trying to look through looks like

</a><br>Haunted Woods 1.13 WC Piece<br>&nbsp;<b>
[download]

I'm trying to match anything that appears between the two BR tags whether it's 1 word, multi words, hypens, numbers, etc.

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Re: html regex problem by marto (Cardinal) on Apr 19, 2006 at 15:27 UTC
Anonymous Monk, I think that it is better to use a module such as HTML::TokeParser or HTML::TokeParser::Simple for this sort of task. Check out the tutorial HTML::TokeParser Tutorial as well as the documentation for the modules. Hope this helps. Martin	[reply]
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Re: html regex problem by ikegami (Patriarch) on Apr 19, 2006 at 16:36 UTC
`(.+)?` (optionally match one or more characters) should be `(.+?)` (match one or more characters non-greedily) For example, `$saved_page = <<'__EOI__'; </a><br>Haunted Woods 1.13 WC Piece<br> <b> </a><br>Moo Moo 1.23 WD Piece<br> <b> </a><br>Foo Bar 1.14 WC Piece<br> <b> __EOI__ push (@items, $1) while $saved_page =~ m#</a><br>(.+?)<br> <b>#g; print("$_\n") foreach @items;` [download] outputs `Haunted Woods 1.13 WC Piece Moo Moo 1.23 WD Piece Foo Bar 1.14 WC Piece` [download] Update: If there can be newlines, don't forget to use `/.../gs` instead of `/.../g`.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
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Re: html regex problem by prasadbabu (Prior) on Apr 19, 2006 at 15:33 UTC
As marto suggested it is best to use the modules, which he has suggested. If you want to try with regex, here is one way to do it. You have to take a look at perlre I'm trying to match anything that appears between the two BR tags `$saved_page = '</a><br>Haunted Woods 1.13 WC Piece<br> <b>'; while ($saved_page =~ m#<br>((?(?!<br>).)+)<br>#g) { push (@items, $1) } print "@items";` [download] Prasad	[reply] [d/l]