http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=1017547

SteveBo has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am trying to write some code, and as a newbie, have some issues. I am trying to parse some HTML pages of some college athletic directories and get a list of all the coaches. I want to go through the page until i match a "section" regex, grab each row (tr) after, until i find another match for my section regex, then start again. I have figured out how to get the sport, and first coach under the heading, but cannot get where i can grab all the coaches under the heading until the next heading match. See my code below:

while ($content =~ m/<(td|th).*?<strong>(<.*?>)?(&nbsp;)?(?<sport>([(] +?(Women('|&#39;)s|Men('|&#39;)s|W|M)?[)]?(\s|&nbsp;)?)?(Archery|Badmi +nton|Baseball|Basketball|Bowling|Cross Country|Track (&|&amp;|[Aa]nd) + Field|Equestrian|Fencing|Field Hockey|Football|Golf|Gymnastics|Ice H +ockey|Lacrosse|Rowing|Rifle|Rugby|Skiing|Soccer|Softball|Squash|Swimm +ing ([Aa]nd |\s?[\/-]\s?|)Diving|Swimming|Diving|Synchronized Swim|Te +am Handball|Handball|Tennis|Volleyball|Water Polo|Wrestling)(\s?[-,]\ +s?)?\s?[(]?(Women(('|&#39;)s)?|Men(('|&#39;)s)?|W|M)?[)]?):?(.*?)?<\/ +(strong|br)>/gi) { print $+{sport} . "\r\n"; if ($content =~ m/\G.*?<tr.*?>(.*?)<\/tr>/sgc) { my $coach_info = $1; while ($coach_info =~ m/<td.*?>(.*?)<\/td>/mg) { print $1 . "\r\n"; } } }

Any ideas?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Parsing HTML Pages
by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Feb 07, 2013 at 03:16 UTC
Re: Parsing HTML Pages
by Kenosis (Priest) on Feb 07, 2013 at 04:01 UTC

    Welcome to PerlMonks, SteveBo!

    You've likely noted the document that Your Mother has rightfully linked to, as it attempts to dissuade one from using a regex to parse html.

    There are excellent html parsing Modules you can use, and a recent sharing of some can be found at this PM node: HTML Parser suggestions.

    Hope this helps!