Re: How can I find the contents of an HTML tag?

[mikfire]

Assuming that the distinguishing characteristic of the TD entry you want to extract is the leading and following space, I'd suggested a regex something like this:

my( $var ) = $html =~ m#<TD> (.*?) </TD>#;

print "We found it: $var\n" if defined $var;

The part inside the capturing parens (.*?) says to save any characters found, possibly none. It says to take the fewest possible characters to complete the match — i.e., be non-greedy.

The only way you will be able to know if the match succeeded is to test for definedness. Testing for true/false will fail on the empty case because perl treats the empty string as false.

If the <TD>Foo:</TD> part will always occur immediately in front of the <TD> instances you're interested in, we can make the regex more robust:

m#<TD>Foo:</TD><TD> (.*?) </TD>#