Re^2: Extracting variable-length strings between delimiters

While I'm looking at the responses, here's the requested data sample (read in from a file with a consistent name):

...<tr><td colspan="3">
<span><strong>SomeNameHere</strong></span> <span class="small">(Transa
+ction ID #5HN04039SW052A35R)</span><br><br>
</td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="3"><hr class="dotted"></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="3"><br class="h10"></td></tr>
...<td class="item-title" width="40%">Name of the first item</td>
<td align="center" class="qty" width="9%">14</td>...
<tr><td colspan="3"><hr class="dotted"></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="3"><br class="h10"></td></tr>
...<td class="item-title" width="40%">Name of the second item</td>
<td align="center" class="qty" width="9%">12</td>...
[download]

From which I want to extract:

5HN04039SW052A35R

Name of the first item 14

Name of the second item 12

...

As you can see, there are varying lengths of unpredictable non-unique characters, quotation marks and angle brackets between the start string and the desired text. What is known is that they are always preceded somewhere by "Transaction ID", "item-title" and "qty" and terminated with a parenthesis for the transaction ID and "" tag for the item and quantity.

Comment on Re^2: Extracting variable-length strings between delimiters Download Code

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Re^3: Extracting variable-length strings between delimiters by ahmad (Hermit) on Feb 12, 2010 at 08:39 UTC
Since what you have is HTML I think it's better to use html parser module for this job #!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; use HTML::TokeParser; my $Text; { local $/; $Text = <DATA>; } my $p = HTML::TokeParser->new( \$Text ); while ( my $token = $p->get_tag('td') ) { my $txt = $p->get_trimmed_text("/td"); print $txt,"\n"; } __DATA__ ...<tr><td colspan="3"> <span><strong>SomeNameHere</strong></span> <span class="small">(Transa +ction ID #5HN04039SW052A35R)</span><br><br> </td></tr> <tr><td colspan="3"><hr class="dotted"></td></tr> <tr><td colspan="3"><br class="h10"></td></tr> ...<td class="item-title" width="40%">Name of the first item</td> <td align="center" class="qty" width="9%">14</td>... <tr><td colspan="3"><hr class="dotted"></td></tr> <tr><td colspan="3"><br class="h10"></td></tr> ...<td class="item-title" width="40%">Name of the second item</td> <td align="center" class="qty" width="9%">12</td>... [download] Untested	[reply] [d/l]

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Re^3: Extracting variable-length strings between delimiters
by ahmad (Hermit) on Feb 12, 2010 at 08:39 UTC

Since what you have is HTML I think it's better to use html parser module for this job

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

my $Text;
{ local $/; $Text = <DATA>; }

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

while ( my $token = $p->get_tag('td') ) {
    my $txt = $p->get_trimmed_text("/td");
    print $txt,"\n";    
}

__DATA__
...<tr><td colspan="3">
<span><strong>SomeNameHere</strong></span> <span class="small">(Transa
+ction ID #5HN04039SW052A35R)</span><br><br>
</td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="3"><hr class="dotted"></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="3"><br class="h10"></td></tr>
...<td class="item-title" width="40%">Name of the first item</td>
<td align="center" class="qty" width="9%">14</td>...
<tr><td colspan="3"><hr class="dotted"></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="3"><br class="h10"></td></tr>
...<td class="item-title" width="40%">Name of the second item</td>
<td align="center" class="qty" width="9%">12</td>...
[download]

Untested

[reply]
[d/l]