trying to match a greek phrase in a greek text

Arien0611 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

hello all. you are my last resort, cause quite frankly i dont like you guys. ok just kidding. i ve spent about an hour searching in googleland, how can i match a specific phrase consisted of greek letters, inside a greek text. actually, the source of a web page, having greek context. ie i wanna match the part:

<A HREF="story.do?id=6908144&publDate=20/6/2012"><div class="reportageStoryUTitle">ŤΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΗ ΧΑΛΥΒΟΥΡΓΙΑť</div>

this line, is part of a greater line, which has a repetition of the above code, with the only difference, being the greek phrase, and it is not always on the same position of this line. by just searching for the part "ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΗ ΧΑΛΥΒΟΥΡΓΙΑ" the code would just grab the first piece of these similar fractions of html code, regardless of the greek phrase, seeming like it doesn't understand greek at all

i ve tried using "use utf8;" but when i use it, the script can't even find the entire html code part, not just greek phrase. i ve set my linux local to "export LC_ALL=el_GR.UTF-8" and when i tried:

cat test | perl -Mencoding='utf8' -e 'print <STDIN>'

where test is a file with greek letters, it printed it out just fine. i may be asking something newbie here, but i m really stuck, but any help would be appreciated. thanks for your time

ps: the html code in reality, doesnt actually contain 3digit parts. but actual letters in greek

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Re: trying to match a greek phrase in a greek text by CountZero (Bishop) on Jun 20, 2012 at 20:43 UTC
The webpage should actually have an explicit encoding mentioned. Something like "`Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1`". You will need to use the same encoding when you read the webpage into your script. CountZero A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James My blog: Imperial Deltronics	[reply] [d/l]
Re: trying to match a greek phrase in a greek text by andal (Hermit) on Jun 21, 2012 at 07:13 UTC
Well, maybe if your provide link to the page, then it would be easier to say, what should you do. In general, the locale does not make much difference. More important is to know which encoding is used by the HTML document you get. It can be in UTF-8, or in UTF-16, or even iso-8859-7. Knowing the encoding of the document you shall convert the text from the page into "perl's encoding". This is done using Encode module, specifically with Encode::decode(ENCODING, $text). After that you can apply to the resulting text your regular expressions. Another important note. When writing your regular expressions, you put into them greek letters. So, now your own program also contains letters in some encoding. The encoding of the program depends on the editor (and possibly locale). If your editor saves everything in UTF-8 (default on Linux), then you can simply specify "use utf8;" to tell perl that the text in regular expressions is encoded using UTF-8 locale, then perl automatically converts them to "perl's encoding" before matching.	[reply]
Re: trying to match a greek phrase in a greek text by daxim (Curate) on Jun 21, 2012 at 12:12 UTC
It's simple. use utf8; use strictures; use Web::Query qw(); my $w = Web::Query->new_from_html(<<'HTML'); <A HREF="story.do?id=6908144&publDate=20/6/2012"><div class="reportageStoryUTitle">ŤΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΗ ΧΑΛΥΒΟΥΡΓΙΑť</div> HTML print $w ->find(':contains("ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΗ ΧΑΛΥΒΟΥΡΓΙΑ")') ->first # "just grab the first piece of these similar fractions of html code" ->text	[reply]