Regular expression

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

HI monks, I want a regular expression to remove unwanted span tags like

This

<span>
              <span>
                <span style="color:#000000;">
                  <ix:nonNumeric name="uk-bus:PrincipalLocation-CityOr
+Town">London</ix:nonNumeric>
                </span>
              </span>
            </span>
[download]

<ix:nonNumeric name="uk-bus:PrincipalLocation-CityOrTown">London</ix:nonNumeric>

I would like to remove the upper and lower span tags

Comment on Regular expression Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Regular expression by marto (Cardinal) on Feb 03, 2012 at 12:38 UTC
In your previous question (also titled Regular expression) you were advised to use an HTML parser. I suggest you take this advice and do the appropriate research. Super Search will return similar discussions/solutions. See Working with HTML from the tutorials section.	[reply]
Re: Regular expression by chessgui (Scribe) on Feb 03, 2012 at 12:41 UTC
`my $input=<<HERE; <span> <span> <span style="color:#000000;"> <ix:nonNumeric name="uk-bus:PrincipalLocation-CityOr +Town">London</ix:nonNumeric> </span> </span> </span> HERE $input=~s/<\/?span[^>]*>//g; print $input;` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Regular expression by repellent (Priest) on Feb 05, 2012 at 03:46 UTC
`useXML::Twig;` `XML::Twig->new( twig_handlers => { span => sub { $_->replace_with($_->children_copy) }, }, )->parse(<<'XML')->print; <d> <span> foobar <span> <baz>bax</baz> <span style="color:#000000;"> <ix:nonNumeric name="uk-bus:PrincipalLocation-CityOrTown">Lond +on</ix:nonNumeric> </span> </span> </span> </d> XML print "\n"; __END__ <d> foobar <baz>bax</baz><ix:nonNumeric name="uk-bus:PrincipalLocation-CityOr +Town">London</ix:nonNumeric></d>` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: Regular expression by mirod (Canon) on Feb 05, 2012 at 08:05 UTC
If the input is not well-formed XML but HTML, you can use `parse_html` instead of `parse` in order to internally convert the HTML to XHTML before processing.	[reply]