Re: Stripping HTML tags efficiently

[TedPride]

It looks like you're just trying to extract the tags from the document. The following should work:

use strict; use warnings;

read(DATA, $_, 1024);
print join "\n", m/<.*?>/g;

__DATA__
Once <a href="foo.html">upon</a> a time there was a
<font color="#FF0000">CODE <b>RED</b></font> situation.

EDIT: As per Crian's comment, the above should be print join "\n", m/<.*?>/sg; instead.

Or a line by line version, if you're working with large files:

use strict; use warnings;

while (<DATA>) {
    print $&."\n" while m/<.*?>/g;
}

__DATA__
Once <a href="foo.html">upon</a> a time there was a
<font color="#FF0000">CODE <b>RED</b></font> situation.

This is not really a robust method, however, and you're probably better off using a library unless your needs are simple and you're sure the tags are formatted properly.

[Your Mother]

Both approaches are pretty flawed. Breaking text into chunks is going to break tags in half often, eg

<p style="bor1024_markder:1px solid black">

and reading line by line is going to split tags in half that cross lines:

<img src="/some/path/somewhere.png"
 alt="A long title"
 style="display:block"
 class="article" />

Parsing HTML correctly is non-trivial. With one of the html parser modules, like HTML::TokeParser et al, you'll be sure it's right.

[Crian]

And what, if a tag is splitted onto two or more lines? You will miss that ones by doing it this way.