comment on

Ive read many warnings against parsing html with regular expressions but for this task, are they still valid?

You can parse html with a regex but, imo, its tricky. I always reach for a parser. There are many and monks recommend different modules. fwi I tend to stick to HTML::TokeParser::Simple.

Perhaps something like this (it even has a regex):

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use HTML::TokeParser::Simple;

my $html_in = do{local $/;<DATA>};
my $p = HTML::TokeParser::Simple->new(\$html_in) or die qq{cant parse 
+html\n};

my $html_out;
my $re = qr/html|head|title|body|p|img/;

while (my $t = $p->get_token){
    if (not $t->is_tag()){
        $html_out .= $t->as_is;
    }
    elsif ($t->is_tag($re)){
        $html_out .= $t->as_is;
    }
}
print qq{$html_out\n};


__DATA__
<html>
<head>
<title>title</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>one <b>two</b> <i>three</i></p>
<p><img src="four.gif" alt="img"> <a href="five.html">five</a></p>
<p><font>six</font></p>
</body>
</html>
[download]

output:

<html>
<head>
<title>title</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>one two three</p>
<p><img src="four.gif" alt="img"> five</p>
<p>six</p>
</body>
</html>
[download]

Post a new question if this isn't what you meant or if you want more information.

In reply to Re^2: Simplify HTML programatically by wfsp
in thread Simplify HTML programatically by guha

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