I'd rather repair my car's transmission with a toothbrush but my automechanic just laughed at me when I asked how to go about it.

Update:

For the best toothbrush you can get ahold of, try Regexp::Common. It has a "balanced" method that might help. If you decide to go the mechanic's tools route, use something along the lines of HTML::LinkExtractor, or HTML::SimpleParse, or HTML::TreeBuilder, or HTML::Parser.

Hey! It's all ball bearings nowadays. It's so simple maybe you need a refresher course. Now get some 3-in-1 oil and some gauze pads, and I'm gonna need 'bout ten quarts of anti-freeze, preferably Prestone. No, no make that Quaker State.

Fletch (the movie).



Dave

*cough* how to classify this toothdrill? YAPE::HTML - Yet Another Parser/Extractor for HTML

MJD says "you can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo!"

I run a Win32 PPM repository for perl 5.6.x and 5.8.x -- I take requests (README).

** The third rule of perl club is a statement of fact: pod is sexy.

Greetings Anonymous,

Also, I know i could use some sort of XML module for this, but I'd rather do it with regex.

Why? Why go to the trouble of making an incomplete regex that will eventually fail instead of just using a CPAN module? I would strongly recommend you read up about parsers like HTML::TokeParser. You will save yourself a lot of heartache. As a general rule, CPAN is always better than trying to do it yourself. Always.

I'm not sure exactly what you want to pull from your content, but here's a basic example to get you going:

use HTML::TokeParser;
my ($type, $mesg);
my $page = HTML::TokeParser->new(\$content);
while (my $token = $page->get_tag('msg')) {
  $type = $token->[1]{dest};
  $mesg = $token->[3];
}
[download]

davido gave the correct answer already, but here's a simple hack regexp that matches your particular example.

  /<([a-zA-Z]+)(?:(?:\s+[^>]+)*|\s*)>([^<]*)<\/\1>/
[download]

This *will* break in a lot of cases, so if you can at all, use one of the modules that davido recommended, not a silly hack like this.