reg exp question

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

i have a string with a bunch of href tags strung together
I tried to pull them out individually into an array like
my @tags = $content =~ m%(<a href="http://dynamodata.*/a>)%g;
but it just puts them all into one string in $tags[0]
can anyone help?

Original content restored above by GrandFather

i figured it out!

Comment on reg exp question

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Re: reg exp question by ikegami (Patriarch) on Jul 28, 2009 at 23:04 UTC
`my $tags = join '', $content =~ m%(<a href="http://dynamodata.*/a>)%g;` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re: reg exp question by ww (Archbishop) on Jul 28, 2009 at 23:22 UTC
split Customarily you'ld want to use one of the modules designed to parse .html, but if your data is exactly as stated (are you sure?) split may be a workable approach.	[reply]
Re: reg exp question by quester (Vicar) on Jul 29, 2009 at 09:35 UTC
Since no one seems to have mentioned it so far... The basic problem here is greedy matching. The "`.`" is a greedy match so "`m%(<a href="http://dynamodata./a>)%g`" will match exactly once, with "`.`" matching everything between the first occurrence of "`<a href="http://dynamodata`" and the last* occurrence of "`/a>`". If, as in this case, you want to match the first following occurrence of "`/a>`" you can use the non-greedy form "`.?`". So, `@tags = $content =~ m%(<a href="http://dynamodata.?/a>)%g;` [download] should work (not tested, since I'm not at the right machine at the moment....)	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: reg exp question by hnd (Scribe) on Jul 29, 2009 at 11:46 UTC
why not use HTML::TokeParser... its better to use that as it extracts HTML string exactly as you want.... just type HTML::TokeParser in google and the first (or maybe second) link would be to the perl monks tokeparser tutorial... "just keep it simple, stupid" :) ===================================================== i'am worst at what do best and for this gift i fell blessed... i found it hard it's hard to find well whatever NEVERMIND	[reply]