Craig Cardimon wrote:
> I need to strip HTML-style "<" and ">" tags and their contents from
> ASCII text while not disturbing customized tags that might
> say <TYPE> or
> <DESCRIPTION>. Is there a way to do this without going bonkers?
>
> I'm using
>
> ***
>
> s/<(?:[^>'"]*|(['"]).*?\1)*>//gs;
>
> ***
>
> to strip all angle braces from the text. It works like gangbusters,
> but I've discovered it works a little too well.
>
> Now I need something I can apply more judiciously. Any hints, tips, or
> suggestions would be appreciated.
Assuming that "HTML-style" is sufficiently different from HTML
(otherwise the answer would be HTML::Parser), and based on your regex
working "like gangbusters", you could defer the decision of what markup
to keep or discard to a subroutine, e.g.
s/(<(?:[^>'"]*|(['"]).*?\1)*>)/transform($1)/egs;
Where the subroutine looks something like (untested):
my %keepit = ("<TYPE>" => 1, "<DESCRIPTION>" => 1);
sub transform {
if (defined $keepit{$_[0]}) {
return $_[0];
}
else {
return "";
}
}
As an aside, your regex is looking a bit hairy. I would suggest using x
switch, possibly with the qr operator, so that you can break the regex
into multiple lines with embedded comments. I find it easier to follow
what is going on.
HTH
--
Brian Raven
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