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

Hi

I am trying to get a regex to look through $source ($source = get($url);) and see if <option value="0_memberOf_ exists, and if so, I want to copy anything in the option tag's value.

Can someone help me with this one?

  • Comment on Quick regex for finding something in an OPTION tag

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Re: Quick regex for finding something in an OPTION tag
by ig (Vicar) on Oct 28, 2008 at 21:19 UTC

    Parsing HTML correctly is non-trivial. You might find it better to use one of the existing modules for parsing the HTML. HTML::Parser and HTML::TreeBuilder come to mind.

[reply]
Re: Quick regex for finding something in an OPTION tag
by GrandFather (Saint) on Oct 28, 2008 at 23:24 UTC

    The regex you want is trivial: /^0_memberOf_/. Figuring out where to use it is more interesting. Using HTML::Parser you could:

    use warnings;
use strict;
use HTML::Parser;

my $html = <<HTML;
<html>
  <body>
    <option value="0_memberOf_x">Ya want this?</option>
  </body>    
</html>
HTML

my $h = HTML::Parser->new ();
my @stack;

$h->handler (start => sub {return startOption  (\@stack, @_);}, 'tag, 
+attr');
$h->handler (text => sub {return optionText  (\@stack, @_);}, 'text');
$h->handler (end => sub {return endOption  (\@stack, @_);}, '');
$h->parse ($html);


sub startOption {
    my ($stack, $tag, $attr) = @_;

    push @$stack, [$tag, $attr->{value}];
}


sub optionText {
    my ($stack, $text) = @_;
    
    return unless @$stack;
    push @{$stack->[-1]}, $text;
}


sub endOption {
    my ($stack) = @_;
    my ($tag, $match, $text) = @{pop @$stack};
    
    return unless $tag eq 'option' && defined ($match) && $match =~ /^
+0_memberOf_/;
    print "$match: $text\n";
}

    [download]

    Prints:

    0_memberOf_x: Ya want this?

    [download]
    Perl reduces RSI - it saves typing
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Re: Quick regex for finding something in an OPTION tag
by aquarium (Curate) on Oct 29, 2008 at 03:16 UTC
    i'd normally use the CGI module and $myvar=param('option')
    perldoc -f CGI shows some good examples
    the hardest line to type correctly is: stty erase ^H
[reply]

      Can you post some code which shows how you parse HTML with CGI? I'm curious!

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