Okay, I'm new to Perl, so this is probably a simple question...

I am attempting to edit an XML/XHTML document that was generated by a Quark extraction utility. The paragraphs in the document use nested span tags to apply formatting, and I am attempting to fix the issues associated with that.

For instance:

<p><span class="type1"><span class="type2">text </span>italictext<span
+ class="type2"> text</span></span></p>

[download]

In that example, the span class="type1" is applying an italic style to the entire paragraph. Then the type2 is applying a non-italic style to large sections of the paragraph and leaving individual words to be italicized.

Now, instances like this are easy to catch with a regex, but they can also be more involved:

<p><span class="type1"><span class="type2">text </span></span><span cl
+ass="SmallCaps">text</span><span class="type1"><span class="type2"> t
+ext </span>italictext<span class="type2"> text </span>italictext<span
+ class="type2"> text</span>italictext<span class="type2"> text </span
+>italictext<span class="type2"> text </span>italictext<span class="ty
+pe2"> text </span>italictext<span class="type2"> text.</span></span><
+/p>

[download]

Notice that the "SmallCaps" span is added in the middle of the paragraph and that there are multiple instances of the type2 tags.

Of course, I also have to deal with the possiblilty of the type2 tags being used to apply an italics style, like in this example I found:

<p>text <span class="type2">italictext</span>text<span class="type2">i
+talictext</span>text</p>

[download]

What I would like to do is be able to match the opening and closing tags to each other and make adjustments as necessary to remove the extraneous mark-up. For instance, I want the first instace above to look like this:

<p>text <i>italictext</i> text</p>

[download]

I need to know if anyone can help me or direct me to an extremely simple example of/tutorial on the XML::Parser or HTML::Parser module, since I am sure that one of those does what I need to do. Again, I am very new at this, so any help will be greatly appreciated.

In reply to Parsing XML/HTML by sartzava

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


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