From: Simon Krahnke <overlord@...>
Date: 2009-05-06T16:05:03+09:00
Subject: Re: removing Whitespace using regexp

* Arun Kumar <arunkumar@innovaturelabs.com> (07:54) schrieb:

> Hi,
>    Previously I posted a topic on how to strip all html tags and getting
> the remaining text using regexp. Luckily I got one. This is the regexp:
>
> /([^>]*)(?=<[^>]*?>)/im

And what do you do with this regexp?

> In this case I'm able to get all the data between the html tags. But one
> small problem.

Hasn't everybody told you, there are problems with parsing HTML with regexps?

> This is the output which I get when I parse the html content of
> example.com using the above regexp. Here you can see some white space
> between the data(ie. between 'Example web page' and 'You have
> reached...'. These whitespaces are generated in place of the html tags
> which I avoided using the above regexp.

Really? Aren't they just from all the meaningless whitespace that's in
a typical HTML document?

> I want to remove those
> whitespaces. I think that modifying the above regexp will give me the
> right output without white spaces. Can somebody please help me.

There are easy ways to strip all the whitespace, which is certainly not
what you want, and there is a simple way to reduce all runs of whitespace
by just one space (gsub(/\s+/, ' '), which probably also not what you
want.

Selectively removing some of the whitespace isn't easy at all, but it is
probably a lot easier with a real HTML parser.

mfg,                        simon .... l