From: Tobias DiPasquale <anany@...>
Date: 2002-03-24T04:20:27+09:00
Subject: extracting multi-line <a> tags?

Hi all,

	I was recently wondering if there was a straightforward way to match <a
ref="..."> tags in a web page where the tags might span multiple lines?
What I want to do is the following:

1. download the page (I can do that already, with Net::HTTP)

2. scan it for the following pattern:

	<a href="<something>"> | Something Here | </a>

These tags can (and do) span multiple lines.

NOTE: What I mean here is that I would like to match the beginning of the
a href tag as one "token", then put the contents of the tag in another
token, while putting the </a> closer tag in yet another token. The
vertical bars are simply to show this idea.

I was trying a variety of combinations of String.split and
String.each_line w/matching regexps but none of them seem to be working
for me. Is this a job for a regular expression (or several of them), or
does it require a context-free grammar to match (i.e. the use of a
parser, such as Bison or whatnot)?

Thanks in advance!!

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