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

I need to strip the paragraph tags from the beginning and end of a string. i thought this would work: 
$testtext =~ s/(^<p>|<\/p>$)//;

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it does replace the beginning tag, but not the ending tag. i know this should be incredibly simple, but can't figure out what i'm doing wrong....

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Re: simple replace question
by graff (Chancellor) on Jul 06, 2009 at 13:55 UTC
    If the string does not have <p> or </p> tags in the middle (or if it does and you want to get rid of those as well), you could do it like this: 
    $testtext =~ s{</?p>}{}g;

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    (but when removing these tags from the middle of a string, it might be better to replace them with some sort of whitespace, to avoid creating run-on words)
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Re: simple replace question
by JavaFan (Canon) on Jul 06, 2009 at 13:47 UTC
    It removes <p> at the beginning, or </p> at the end of the string, but not both.

    You might want to use the /g modifier. Or what I would do: 

    $testtext =~ s/^<p>//;
$testtext =~ s!</p>$!!;

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      JavaFan - thanks! In your second line, the "!"s should be "/"s, right?
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Re: simple replace question
by poolpi (Hermit) on Jul 06, 2009 at 19:32 UTC

    If you need to deal with a HTML document:

    #!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use HTML::TokeParser;


# Simple example :

my $doc = <<END;
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<p>FooOooo barbar baz</p>
<p>Babar Foofoo zba zba</p>
<p>oofOOoof zzbb aarr</p>
</body>
</html>
END

my $p = HTML::TokeParser->new( \$doc );

while ( $p->get_tag("p") ) {
    my $text = $p->get_trimmed_text;
    print "Text: $text\n";
}

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    hth,
    PooLpi

    'Ebry haffa hoe hab im tik a bush'. Jamaican proverb
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Re: simple replace question
by morgon (Priest) on Jul 06, 2009 at 17:02 UTC
    Rather then capturing the tags I would capture the content:

    $testtext =~ s|^<p>(.*?)</p>$|$1|;

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      morgon,

      this looks like the best suggestion!! given the greediness of grep, this approach would ignore any internal <p> tags? that's what i want - just to strip off the first and last tag.

      thanks -
      janaki
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Re: simple replace question
by stevemayes (Scribe) on Jul 06, 2009 at 17:19 UTC
    Text::Trim's function is to strip whitespace off the ends of strings (although I think that I really like morgan's approach).
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Re: simple replace question
by Marshall (Canon) on Jul 07, 2009 at 08:27 UTC
    There are a number of regex's that would work here. The basic idea is to replace stuff that looks like <p> or <Xp>with nothing via a match global. 
    #!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $test = '<p>this is some<1p> paragraph</p>';

$test =~ s/<.?p>//g; #s/<.??p>//g; #also ok

print "$test\n";
__END__
prints:
this is some paragraph

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