perl extract text between html tags using regex - html

Question

I'm new to Perl and im trying to extract the text between all <li> </li> tags in a string and assign them into an array using regex or split/join.
e.g.
my $string = "<ul>
<li>hello</li>
<li>there</li>
<li>everyone</li>
</ul>";
So that this code...
foreach $value(#array){
print "$value\n";
}
...results in this output:
hello
there
everyone

Answer 1

Note: Do not use regular expressions to parse HTML.
This first option is done using HTML::TreeBuilder, one of many HTML Parsers that is available to use. You can visit the link provided above and read the documentation and see the example's that are given.
use strict;
use warnings;
use HTML::TreeBuilder;
my $str
= "<ul>"
. "<li>hello</li>"
. "<li>there</li>"
. "<li>everyone</li>"
. "</ul>"
;
# Now create a new tree to parse the HTML from String $str
my $tr = HTML::TreeBuilder->new_from_content($str);
# And now find all <li> tags and create an array with the values.
my #lists =
map { $_->content_list }
$tr->find_by_tag_name('li');
# And loop through the array returning our values.
foreach my $val (#lists) {
print $val, "\n";
}
If you decide you want to use a regular expression here (I don't recommend). You could do something like..
my $str
= "<ul>"
. "<li>hello</li>"
. "<li>there</li>"
. "<li>everyone</li>"
. "</ul>"
;
my #matches;
while ($str =~/(?<=<li>)(.*?)(?=<\/li>)/g) {
push #matches, $1;
}
foreach my $m (#matches) {
print $m, "\n";
}
Output:
hello
there
everyone

Answer 2

Note: Do not use regular expressions to parse HTML.
hwnd has already provided one HTML Parser solution.
However, for a more modern HTML Parser based off css selectors, you can check out Mojo::DOM. There is a very informative 8 minute intro video at Mojocast episode 5.
use strict;
use warnings;
use Mojo::DOM;
my $html = do {local $/; <DATA>};
my $dom = Mojo::DOM->new($html);
for my $li ($dom->find('li')->text->each) {
print "$li\n";
}
__DATA__
<ul>
<li>hello</li>
<li>there</li>
<li>everyone</li>
</ul>
Outputs:
hello
there
everyone