Date: 26 Sep 2001 01:41:41 GMT From: damian@qimr.edu.au (Damian James) Subject: Re: Pattern Matching Message-Id: On Tue, 25 Sep 2001 19:36:20 -0600, phookie said: >How would one match/sub a string which begins with a "<" with zero or >more"<", ">" alphanumerics, quotes, equal signs, period, commas, >semi-colons, underscores, forward "/" and back "\" slashes, white space, >etc and ends with a ">" character. >This does not appear to work > > $mystring =~ s/^<[A-Z a-z 0-9 "=.,;_/\\\s].+>$/my_new_string/; > It looks like you are trying to parse html. While it may seem like you could do it with simple pattern matching, this is not in fact the case. You need a fully fledged parser. See perlfaq9: How do I remove HTML from a string? (type 'perldoc -q html' at the command prompt). This FAQ contains a few tips that you will find valuable, even if Ihave misread the above and you are trying to parse something other than html. HTH Cheers, Damian -- @:=grep!(m!$/|#!..$|),split//,;@;=0..$#:;while($:=@;){$;=rand $:--,@;[$;,$:]=@;[$:,$;]while$:;push@|,shift@;if$;[0]==@|;select$,, $,,$,,1/80;print qq x\bxx((@;+@|)*$|++),@:[@|,@;],!@;&&$/} __END__ Just another Perl Hacker,### http://home.pacific.net.au/~djames.hub