Matching two wildcards with perl and regex

borinus · 09-06-2008, 01:41 PM

Hi,

I am new at regex, and need some help.

I am trying to create a regular expression for 2 hours but could not do that. What am I missing?

I have a string like this.. It is in the $content variable..

(text...);PADDING-BOTTOM: 4px;">Type:  <a class=type href="ps.asp?order=yes">PlayStation 3</a>(...text)

and would like to get PlayStation 3 value from there. I have to create regex something like this.

Type:  <a class=* href=*>(.*?)</a>

so "href" should stay there..

I have written this code,

if ($content =~ /Type<\/font><\/b>:  <a class=.+ href=.+>(.*?)<\/a> /) {
$platform = $1;
}

but it gives "Namco" as a result. Namco is in the following line. Why it gives that one, I have "Type" value in front of regex not producer. what should I do?

Producer:  <a class=producer href="pd.asp?name=namco">Namco</a>

Thanks,

nadroj · 09-08-2008, 07:32 PM

in your $content variables im assuming you are escaping the double-quotes, even though you explicitly stated what string was in $content (without the escaped quotes, ie \")

for your "Namco" line the expression is not giving the incorrect output, it is actually not even matched at all. notice at the end of the regex there is a " " but this is not present in your "Producer...Namco" line, so the string is never matched. since the if block is not executed in this case (and $platform is not set to $1), $platform must have already had the value of "Namco". to see this, set the value of $platform to something else or empty and when it is printed it will not have changed.

whenever i am debugging any code i will use print statements to ensure something is (or isnt) happening correctly. a simple debug would be to put a "print "matched!";" line in the if block to see when it is being matched or not.

hope it helps

matthewg42 · 09-09-2008, 03:27 AM

Parsing HTML and XML is difficult. In the long run, will probably save yourself headaches if you use an HTML/XML parsing library rather than trying to do it all with regular expressions.

keefaz · 09-09-2008, 04:04 AM

I would just search for a match with Type
like

Code:

if ($content =~ /Type/) {
    $platform = $content;
    $platform =~ s/.*<a.+order=yes">(.*)<\/a>.*/\1/;
    print "platform: $platform\n";
}

Is it a script made for download thousands of ps games ?