CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexperlexpr
Richard Jones
Richard Jones

Reputation: 45

Using Perl to strip everything from a string except HTML Anchor Links

Using Perl, how can I use a regex to take a string that has random HTML in it with one HTML link with anchor, like this:

  <a href="http://example.com" target="_blank">Whatever Example</a>

and it leave ONLY that and get rid of everything else? No matter what was inside the href attribute with the <a, like title=, or style=, or whatever. and it leave the anchor: "Whatever Example" and the </a>?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 155

Answers (2)

Sinan &#220;n&#252;r
Sinan &#220;n&#252;r

Reputation: 118128

You can take advantage of a stream parser such as HTML::TokeParser::Simple:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use HTML::TokeParser::Simple;

my $html = <<EO_HTML;

Using Perl, how can I use a regex to take a string that has random HTML in it
with one HTML link with anchor, like this:

   <a href="http://example.com" target="_blank">Whatever <i>Interesting</i> Example</a>

       and it leave ONLY that and get rid of everything else? No matter what
   was inside the href attribute with the <a, like title=, or style=, or
   whatever. and it leave the anchor: "Whatever Example" and the </a>?
EO_HTML

my $parser = HTML::TokeParser::Simple->new(string => $html);

while (my $tag = $parser->get_tag('a')) {
    print $tag->as_is, $parser->get_text('/a'), "</a>\n";
}

Output:

$ ./whatever.pl
<a href="http://example.com" target="_blank">Whatever Interesting Example</a>

Upvotes: 2

Chris Smeele
Chris Smeele

Reputation: 977

If you need a simple regex solution, a naive approach might be:

my @anchors = $text =~ m@(<a[^>]*?>.*?</a>)@gsi;

However, as @dan1111 has mentioned, regular expressions are not the right tool for parsing HTML for various reasons.

If you need a reliable solution, look for an HTML parser module.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions