comment on

There was a Perl Journal article by Jon Orwant and Dan Gruhl on precisely this back in 1999.

I've used this technique any number of times for quick hacks. As you correctly observed, there's no need to truck out HTML::* when you just want a snippet of data out of a web page.

Of course, you need to grok regexen pretty well to wield this magic, and the list of cavaets is as long as my arm, but my point is that for quick hacks, this is fine. Don't be ashamed of your heresy. :-)

Peace,
-McD

In reply to Re: Being a heretic and going against the party line. by McD
in thread Being a heretic and going against the party line. by BrowserUk

Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>
Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.