Regular Expression Matching Issue

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

Hi there Monks!
Can someone explain why this code does not match on my code? I have to use regular expression for this.
Thank you very much!!!

#!/perl/bin/perl


use CGI qw(:header);
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);
use CGI qw/:standard/;
use strict;

print header();


use warnings 'all';

my $directory = "/test";
my $new_file = "$directory/test.txt";

my $out_put;

open(FH,'<',$new_file) || die $!;

my @test = <FH>;

foreach my $line (@test)
{
    $line =~ /<!--\s+\d+nd movie -->\s*(.*?)\s*<!--\s+\/\d+nd movie --
+>/sgi;
    $out_put = $1;
    print $out_put;
}

close(FH);
[download]

Here is the test.txt file, I am trying to get whatever is in between tags -  and :

test.txt

<!-- 3nd table --><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0"><t
+r><td>Test Line no end of line.</td</tr></table><!-- /3nd table -->

<!-- 1nd  -->

<table cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" border="0"><tr><td><font color=
+red>Test Line</font></td></tr></table>

<!-- /1nd table -->

<!-- 4nd table --><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="1"><t
+r><td><font color=navy>Test Line no end of line.</font></td></tr></ta
+ble><!-- /4nd table -->

<!-- 2nd table -->
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0"><tr><td>Test Line no
+ end of line.</td</tr></table>
<!-- /2nd table -->
[download]

Thank you very much!!!

Comment on Regular Expression Matching Issue Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Regular Expression Matching Issue by Corion (Patriarch) on Jan 02, 2008 at 19:12 UTC
Just last year, we had a very similar problem here, at Pattern Search on HTML source., which got some good answers. Maybe you can use the answers given there.	[reply]
Re^2: Regular Expression Matching Issue by Anonymous Monk on Jan 02, 2008 at 19:41 UTC
I went there, I am trying to use regular expressions for this, trying not to use any modules like HTML::Parser or XML::XPath.	[reply]
Re: Regular Expression Matching Issue by toolic (Bishop) on Jan 02, 2008 at 19:12 UTC
One reason the regular expression does not match is because you do not have the string "movie" in your test.txt file. There may be other reasons, but I would start with that. Also, you should first check if the regex matched before trying to use `$1`. There are plenty of good HTML parsers available; why do you want to re-invent that wheel?	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Regular Expression Matching Issue by Anonymous Monk on Jan 02, 2008 at 19:39 UTC
Wrong type it should ne table, still doesn't work!!!	[reply]
Re: Regular Expression Matching Issue by olus (Curate) on Jan 02, 2008 at 21:38 UTC
I didn't check the regular expression in order to see if did what you it to do, but I see that you trying to use it as if was applied to the _whole_ file, and you are using it only for a single line each time. The 's' switch isn't working because you are working on a single line. 'join' @test and work on that, or change the foreach cicle and look for lines that have the block begin, capture everything until you find another line that matches the block ending.	[reply]
Re^2: Regular Expression Matching Issue by Punitha (Priest) on Jan 03, 2008 at 04:06 UTC
I agreed with olus You can 'join' @test or while reading from the file itself you can read the whole file in single scalar variable using undef as. `open(FH,'<',$new_file) \|\| die $!; do {local undef $/;$test = <FH>}; close(FH); while($test =~ /<!--\s+\d+nd table -->\s(.?)\s*<!--\s+\/\d+nd table +-->/sgi){ $out_put = $1; print "$out_put\n"; }` [download] I think this code is matching what did you expected Punitha	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: Regular Expression Matching Issue by Anonymous Monk on Jan 03, 2008 at 15:08 UTC
Thanks, it works like that!!!	[reply]


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