parsing html

[dinger2121]

Hello,
I am trying to parse this bit of html -

<span class="hpPageText" >LEGAL</span></td>
<td headers="col2_1" style="width:13%; text-align:right" >
<span class="hpPageText" >151</span></td>

using this line -

m!\<span class="hpPageText" >$field\</span>\</td>(\S*)\<td headers="col2_1" style="width:13%; text-align:right" >(\S*)\<span class="hpPageText" >(.+?)</span>/</td>!is)


The script is not currently finding anything. can anyone see where I might be off?

Thanks

 

[ishnid]

Parsing HTML with regexps is rarely a good idea. Especially if you're not entirely comfortable with them (you're preceding the '<' character with a backslash despite it not having any special meaning within a regexp, and you're using \S instead of \s to match whitespace).

Have a look on CPAN for HTML::TokeParser or HTML::TokeParser::Simple for parsing HTML. Those will be far more robust to minor changes in the HTML code in future (what if they change the width to 14% instead?), which will likely break your regexp.

 

[dinger2121]

thank you....I will look at html::tokeparser::simple.
I am new to Perl, just trying some things out.

Thanks again

 

[dinger2121]

I would like to quickly explain what I would like to accomplish in hopes that someone will affirm that I should be using HTML::TokeParser::Simple.

I have a page that has multiple sections like the following -

<td headers="col1_1" style="width:21%" >
<span class="PageText" >LETTER</span></td>
<td headers="col2_1" style="width:13%; text-align:right" >
<span class="PageText" >4,889</span></td>
<td headers="col3_1" style="width:13%; text-align:right" >
<span class="PageText" >1.0</span></td>
<td headers="col4_1" style="width:13%; text-align:right" >
<span class="PageText" ></span></td>
<td headers="col5_1" style="width:13%; text-align:right" >
<span class="PageText" ></span></td>
<td headers="col6_1" style="width:13%; text-align:right" >
<span class="PageText" >4889.0</span></td>
</tr>

I need to extract the number (in this case the 4,889) from each table row where the first tag (in this case LETTER) equals on or two values. I will then write that number value to a text file.
can anyone suggest a better method to accomplish this?

Thanks again