Question

I have an html page that has particular text that I want to parse into a databse using a Perl Script.

I want to be able to strip off all the stuff I don’t want, an exmple of the html is-

<div class="postbody">
        <h3><a href "foo">Re: John Smith <span class="posthilit">England</span></a></h3>
        <div class="content">Is C# better than Visula Basic?</div>
    </div>

Therefore I would want to import into the database

1. Name: John Smith.
2. Lives in: England.
3. Commented: Is C# better than Visula Basic?

I have started to create a Perl script but it needs to be changed to work for what I want;

    use DBI;

    open (FILE, "list") || die "couldn't open the file!";

    open (F1, ">list.csv") || die "couldn't open the file!";

    print F1 "Name\|Lives In\|Commented\n";

    while ($line=<FILE>)

    {

    chop($line);
    $text = "";
    $add = 0;
    open (DATA, $line) || die "couldn't open the data!";
    while ($data=<DATA>)

    {
    if ($data =~ /ds\-div/)
    {
    $data =~ s/\,//g;
    $data =~ s/\"//g;
    $data =~ s/\'//g;
    $text = $text . $data;
    }

    }

    @p = split(/\\/, $line);
    print F1 $p[2];
    print F1 ",";
    print F1 $p[1];
    print F1 ",";
    print F1 $p[1];
    print F1 ",";  

    print F1 "\n";
    $a = $a + 1;

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Please do not use regular expressions to parse HTML as HTML is not a regular language. Regular expressions describe regular languages.

It is easy to parse HTML with HTML::TreeBuilder (and its family of modules):

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use warnings;
use strict;

use HTML::TreeBuilder;

my $tree = HTML::TreeBuilder->new_from_content(
    do { local $/; <DATA> }
);

for ( $tree->look_down( 'class' => 'postbody' ) ) {
    my $location = $_->look_down( 'class' => 'posthilit' )->as_trimmed_text;
    my $comment  = $_->look_down( 'class' => 'content' )->as_trimmed_text;
    my $name     = $_->look_down( '_tag'  => 'h3' )->as_trimmed_text;
    $name =~ s/^Re:\s*//;
    $name =~ s/\s*$location\s*$//;

    print "Name: $name\nLives in: $location\nCommented: $comment\n";
}

__DATA__
<div class="postbody">
    <h3><a href="foo">Re: John Smith <span class="posthilit">England</span></a></h3>
    <div class="content">Is C# better than Visual Basic?</div>
</div>

Output

Name: John Smith
Lives in: England
Commented: Is C# better than Visual Basic?

However, if you require much more control, have a look at HTML::Parser as has already been answered by ADW.