Per HTML standard, <CR>, <LF> and <space> are interchangeable separators in an HTML document. Moreover, a string of two or more separators is treated like a single separator.

So, if you want to catch <TD><FONT FACE=arial SIZE=-1> with a regex you should expect 0 or more separators wherever a separator is optional and 1 or more wherever it is required. That said, I think that /<TD>\s*<FONT\s+FACE=arial\s+SIZE=-1>/ should be enough.

Thanks for the quick reply psini!
Using your suggestion, I just tried
perl -i -pe 's/<TD>\s*<FONT FACE=arial SIZE=-1>/widget/g' * test.php
unfortunately it didn't work.

However, when I remove the carriage return in the html and run
perl -i -pe 's/<TD><FONT FACE=arial SIZE=-1>/widget/g' * test.php
no problem. Not sure why, but the s* doesn't seem to be recognized.

Thanks again,
Bob

Because you've told perl to read the file a line at a time (well, more you haven't told it not to do otherwise and line is the default) so $_ will only contain <TD>\n and the next line will have <FONT ....>. At no point is the entire contents you expect to match in $_ simultaneously and in the right order so the match never happens and the substitution never triggers.

See the documentation for the -0 switch in perlrun, specifically the part about turning on paragraph mode.

The cake is a lie.
The cake is a lie.
The cake is a lie.

Are you sure it is a CR and not some evil non-printable character used by MS?

Try editing the file with a text editor (not a word processor!), delete the current newline character, insert a CR and try again. If it works, the problem is to find what is the newline character used in the file.

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