Pattern Matching Hell.

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

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Pattern Matching Hell. by davorg (Chancellor) on Apr 04, 2001 at 15:28 UTC
Why not show us what you've got and tell us what problems you're having. We'd far rather help you to solve the problem yourself than do your work for you. -- <http://www.dave.org.uk> "Perl makes the fun jobs fun and the boring jobs bearable" - me	[reply]
Re: Pattern Matching Hell. by jeroenes (Priest) on Apr 04, 2001 at 15:37 UTC
Take a look into HTML::Parser to break down your pulled HTML, make some code to change the parameters and try CGI to rebuild it. Jeroen "We are not alone"(FZ)	[reply]
Re: Re: Pattern Matching Hell. by davorg (Chancellor) on Apr 04, 2001 at 15:41 UTC
Or maybe something built around HTML::TreeBuilder and HTML::Element might be more appropriate in this case. -- <http://www.dave.org.uk> "Perl makes the fun jobs fun and the boring jobs bearable" - me	[reply]
Re: Re: Re: Pattern Matching Hell. by xf86 (Initiate) on Apr 04, 2001 at 18:31 UTC
Thanks for all of the suggestions. I don't have any problems with my code...I just needed suggestions to start writing the part where it reads the file and I couldn't understand how to just search between <start><end>. I'll look in to your suggestions. Thanks a lot. xf86	[reply]
Re: Pattern Matching Hell. by azatoth (Curate) on Apr 04, 2001 at 15:29 UTC
I said tr was good to use. as per posts below, in this instance s is better. Azatoth a.k.a Captain Whiplash Make Your Die Messages Full of Wisdom! Get YOUR PerlMonks Stagename here! Want to speak like a Londoner?	[reply]
Re: Re: Pattern Matching Hell. by davorg (Chancellor) on Apr 04, 2001 at 15:37 UTC
`tr` is for replacing single characters with other single characters (or, maybe, deleting characters). The substitution operator `s///` is much more likely to be useful here. -- <http://www.dave.org.uk> "Perl makes the fun jobs fun and the boring jobs bearable" - me	[reply]
Re: Pattern Matching Hell. by orbital (Scribe) on Apr 05, 2001 at 07:49 UTC
If you don't mind giving up control of your values you can avoid regular expressions by using a simple test case. `if ($value eq "") { $value="whatever"; }` [download]	[reply] [d/l]