Michele Marcionelli wrote:
>
> Hello Beginners,
Hello,
> I was looking for a mailing list about REGEXP but I didn't find it. Maybe
> there is somebody here that can help me...
>
> Suppose you have the following string
>
> $str = "... <b>John <i>Smith</i> (male)</b> and <b>Elisabeth
> <i>Jones</i> (female)</b> ..."
>
> and that you want to find out the container of the first B-tag, that is you
> want to get the string "John <i>Smith</i> (male)". Now, if I use the
> following regexp
>
> $str =~ m/<b>(.*)<\/b>/i;
>
> I get as result, i.e. $1:
>
> "John <i>Smith</i> (male)</b> and <b>Elisabeth <i>Jones</i> (female)"
>
> and not what I wanted!!
That is because the quantifiers ?, * and + are greedy. You need to
append a ? to the quantifier to make it non-greedy (??, *? and +?).
$str =~ m!<b>(.*?)</b>!i;
perldoc perlre
If you need to parse HTML you should really install a module designed to
parse HTML because regular expressions are not the best method.
http://search.cpan.org/search?query=parse+HTML&mode=module
John
--
use Perl;
program
fulfillment
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