In HTML , I Want to process only Data and Not tags

[sanPerl]

Dear Monks,
I need to change all the data in some HTML file. Now since the data is between tags. I capture data like this. (Please assume that $htmlbuffer contains containts of HTML file.)

$htmlbuffer =~ s{>(.*?)<}
{
    my ($mydata) = ($1);
$mydata =~ s/abcd/efgh/gs;
$mydata =~ s/yyy/zzz/gs;
“>$mydata<”
}exgs;

Now here what happens is; the buffer $htmlbuffer gets called many times, just because I want to process data between tags and don’t want to disturb tags. I face same problem while processing XML data also.
This is slowing the program. I am sure someone expert will suggest me a better way.

Regards,
Sandeep

[GrandFather]

No. No way. Never ever (well not often) try to use simple rexen for parsing markup - life is too short to spend the months you would likley need to get the bugs out when others have already done it for you. For HTML see HTML::TreeBuilder. For XHTML or XML see XML::Twig.

See some of the answers to how to eliminate all html tags in a given string ??, and in particular the sample code shown in Re: how to eliminate all html tags in a given string ?? for some sample code and other related suggestions.

[revdiablo]

I second the vote for HTML::TreeBuilder, but I also would like to recommend XML::TreeBuilder. It uses the same handy API, which just makes my life so much simpler. There are most likely cases where other modules -- such as XML::Twig -- make more sense, but I don't know of them off the top of my head.

[lorn]

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Code tags added by GrandFather

[duckyd]

I think you mean to suggest something like:

s/>[^>]+</.../

But in general it's not a good idea to try to roll your own HTML or XML parsing solution when there are plenty of good ones out there.

[n00dles]

This regexp works for me fine.

/^<.*>/

[GrandFather]

I'm sure it does. But what does it work for? As shown it is a match that doesn't capture anything and will match a < at the start of a line, followed by anything at all for as much as it can manage, until it finds a >. For example, all the following match:

'<>'
'<tag>'
"< line of quoted text in an email using '<' instead of the more usual
+ '>'"
'<tag>the stuff OP wanted to retreive</tag>'

note that what is matched isn't even what OP wants to retreive. OP was after element data - the bit between a start tag and a end tag.

BTW, the regex matches the whole last sample line, not just the start tag as you might have expected: .* is greedy.