Why doesn't my Perl match operator match anything?

Question

I'm new to Perl and playing around screen scraping and regex. I'm trying to extract the "title" name of the following HTML block:

... title="The Valley Downs Chicago"><img class="vimg120" ...

My simple Perl code to do so is:

@htmlBlocks = split ("margin-bottom:20px",$content);
foreach $item (@htmlBlocks)
{
if (/\stitle="([^"]*)"/six)
{
    print $1;
}
}

but it doesn't print anything. while i'm troubleshooting it, i though i'd ask the experts if you see anything wrong or potentially problematic. thanks so much in advance for your help!

Why reinvent the wheel -- refer http://stackoverflow.com/questions/254345/how-can-i-extract-urls-from-a-web-page-in-perl — heferav, Nov 01 '09 at 19:55
Also see: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/773340/can-you-provide-an-example-of-parsing-html-with-your-favorite-parser. — FMc, Nov 01 '09 at 19:59
He's reinventing the wheel because he's just learning the language and playing around with the concepts. That's how you learn. — brian d foy, Nov 01 '09 at 20:44

score 9 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 01 '09 at 19:55

By default // search uses $_ variable. If you want to search another variable then specify it before =~. Here is example:

@htmlBlocks = split ("margin-bottom:20px",$content);
foreach $item (@htmlBlocks) {
    if ($item =~ /\stitle="([^"]*)"/six) {
        print $1;
    }
}

Why doesn't my Perl match operator match anything?

1 Answers1