Re: appending a unique marker to each url in a file

[Cubes]

As wonderful as regexes are, sometimes they're more trouble than they're worth. The snippet below will do what you want, regardless of whether your links start with http or not. It won't do the right thing if the href targets aren't quoted, or if you have an <a> tag without an href followed by some other tag with an href before the next link, but this is the 5-minute version.

$pos = 0;
while ($m = shift @markers) {
    # locate the beginning of the link
    last if (($pos = index $htmlfile, '<a', $pos) < 0);
    # ...then the start of the link's href
    last if (($pos = index $htmlfile, 'href="', $pos) < 0);
    # skip past the first "
    $pos += 6;
    # ...then the end of the quoted href target
    last if (($pos = index $htmlfile, '"', $pos) < 0);
    substr($htmlfile, $pos, 0) = $m;
}

At the end, $pos will be -1 and @markers will be empty if you ran out of links before you ran out of markers. If $pos is not -1, do one more index looking for <a and/or href=. If it hits (i.e., does not return -1), you ran out of markers before all of the links were done. If it does return -1, your links and @markers matched up perfectly.

Update: Woops, my ending logic was broken (it's fixed now). The final index check has to be done if $pos is not -1, not just if there's anything left in @markers as I originally stated.