Question

I’m looking for a fast library/class to parse plain text using expressions like below:

Text is: <b>Name:</b>John<br><i>Age</i>32<br>

Pattern is: {*}Name:</b>{%}<br>{*}Age</i>{%}<br>

And it will find me two values: John and 32.
Intent is to parse simple HTML web pages without involving heavy duty tools. It should not be using string operations or regexps internally but probably do char by char parsing.

Answer 1

Since you appear to be asking the user to specify the HTML content you want, it’s probably alright to use regular expressions here (why do you have an aversion to them?). It’s not HTML parsing, anymore, just simple text matching, which is what regular expressions are designed for.

Here’s an example:

$match =~ s/{\*}/.*?/g;
$match =~ s/{%}/(.*?)/g;
$html =~ /$match/;

Which will leave what you need in your capturing groups.