Well, I've been able to slurp the files and read the data into arrays and it makes the coding much faster and easier. I no longer have to use anchor points and offset values and other messy stuff. I'm not getting the exact results I want yet but I'm getting there.

I have another question:

Is it possible to limit the scope of the regexp I'm using (ie. linit the search to an area I define by a regexp which defines the search block of text)? For example:

<p id=paragraph_1>
  <a href="http://www.link1.com">Link1</a> 
  <a href="http://www.link2.com">Link2</a> 
  <a href="http://www.link3.com">Link3</a> 
</p>
<p id=paragraph_2>
  <a href="http://www.link4.com">Link4</a> 
  <a href="http://www.link5.com">Link5</a> 
  <a href="http://www.link6.com">Link6</a> 
</p>
[download]

If I use a regexp to parse the names of the above html links, I'm going to get all of them. What if I only want the ones within the paragraph_2 tags, how would I do that?

Here's an dummy example of code I already have:

local($/, *WEB_DATA);#sets $/ to undef for you
                      and when the scope exits
                      it will revert $/ back to
                      its previous value (most
                      likely "\n")
open (WEB_DATA, "<$myFilename.tmp");
  my $myData = <WEB_DATA>;
close (WEB_DATA);
my @linkName = $myData =~ m/regexp for linkName/g;
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I'm not sure if I've described it correctly, but what I want if to use a regexp like /<p id=paragraph_1>.+?<\/p>/ to define where I want to look, and another rexexp to define what data I want to parse within this block. I hope that makes sense.

Here's one way (using basicly the method you describe in the last para above (+ +), short-circuited to skip any <para id="n"> unless "n" is "2"):

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.012;

# 918508 wants linknames from para 2 only

my @data =
    ('<p id=paragraph_1>',
    '<a href="http://www.link1.com">Link1</a>', 
    '<a href="http://www.link2.com">Link2</a>',
    '<a href="http://www.link3.com">Link3</a>', 
    '</p>',
    '<p id=paragraph_2>',
    '<a href="http://www.link4.com">Link4</a>', 
    '<a href="http://www.link5.com">Link5</a>', 
    '<a href="http://www.link6.com">Link6</a>',
    '</p>',);

my (@linkName, $linkName);
my $flag = 0;
for my $data(@data) {
    chomp $data;
    if ( $data =~ /<p id=paragraph_2>/ ) {
                # when the above is true, we've found para 2
        $flag = 1;
    } 
    
    if ( $flag && ($data !~ /<p id=paragraph_2>/) ) {
                # now, we want to skip the data --the para heading -- 
                # the first time we arrive here, but if it's not the h
+eading, 
                # then capture the link title
        if ( $data =~ m/<a href=.+>(Link\d)<.+/ ) {
            $linkName = $1;
            push @linkName, $linkName;
        }
    }
}

for my $extracted(@linkName) {
    say $extracted;
}
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Output:

Link4
Link5
Link6
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Generalization -- to suit specific needs -- is left as an exercise for the OP.

And BTW, html attribute values should be inside quotes... <p id="para1" class="b">.

Update: Para 1 extended to note that OP was on the right track with the method in the last para of his last previous post.

Thanks for the detailed reply :-)

Although I can follow what you are doing in your code example, I'm a bit confused about one thing. You seem to be processing the @data array line by line, whereas I'm reading my data into a single string variable (slurping, as recommended by the forum). Please correct me if I've misunderstood :-)

Where you have:

my @data =
    ('<p id=paragraph_1>',
    '<a href="http://www.link1.com">Link1</a>', 
    '<a href="http://www.link2.com">Link2</a>',
    '<a href="http://www.link3.com">Link3</a>', 
    '</p>',
    '<p id=paragraph_2>',
    '<a href="http://www.link4.com">Link4</a>', 
    '<a href="http://www.link5.com">Link5</a>', 
    '<a href="http://www.link6.com">Link6</a>',
    '</p>',);
[download]

I seem to have:

my $myData = <WEB_DATA>;

While googling, I came across the pos() function, which is used to find the offset or position of the last matched substring. Maybe this could help me when slurping files?