Question

What is a Perl regex that can replace select text that is not part of an anchor tag? For example I would like to replace only the last “text” in the following code.

blah <a href="http://www.text.com"> blah text blah </a> blah text blah.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I have temporarily prevailed:

$html =~ s|(text)([^<>]*?<)(?!\/a>)|replacement$2|is;

but I was dispirited, dismayed, and enervated by the seminal text; and so shall pursue Treebuilder in subsequent endeavors.