Regular Expression Help

[Saya]

Hi,
here is the scenario:

I have a variable containing the following:
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tr>
<td class="footer">Ottiliavej 9</td>
<td class="footer">telefon 092323</td></tr>
<tr><td class="footer">DK-2500 Valby</td>
<td class="footer">fax 092323</td>
</tr>
</table>

A regular expression that gives me the text(sometext) between the <td
....>sometext</td>
tags ?
I have tried all of my own knowledge og regular expression (which by
the way is very little). Any help will be appeciated.

Thx
Saya

 

[Vlad Tepes]

Hi,
here is the scenario:

I have a variable containing the following:
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tr>
<td class="footer">Ottiliavej 9</td>
<td class="footer">telefon 092323</td></tr>
<tr><td class="footer">DK-2500 Valby</td>
<td class="footer">fax 092323</td>
</tr>
</table>

A regular expression that gives me the text(sometext) between the <td
...>sometext</td>
tags ?
I have tried all of my own knowledge og regular expression (which by
the way is very little). Any help will be appeciated.

Here is one way (assuming the html is stored in $html):

my @tds = $html =~ m#<td class="footer">(.*)</td>#g;

( Matching (=~) has higher precedence than assignment (=), so
the list of captured items by matching $html against the regex
is put into the array @tds. )

To handle cells with newlines, for example

<td class="footer">telefon
092323</td></tr>

you could make the period match newlines (add the modifier 's'), and
then use minimal matching (a questionmark after the quantifier makes it
eat as few characters as possible, ie. find the first '</td>' instead of
the last) thus:

my @tds = $html =~ m#<td class="footer">(.*?)</td>#sg;

Some references:

perldoc perlrequick (gentle intro to regexes)
perldoc perlre (the full story)
perldoc -q html (search faqs for html,
could be of interest)