How can I replace text that is not part of an anchor tag in Perl?

Question

What is a Perl regex that can replace select text that is not part of an anchor tag? For example I would like to replace only the last "text" in the following code.

blah <a href="http://www.text.com"&gt; blah text blah </a> blah text blah.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Don't use regexps for this kind of stuff. Use some proper HTML parser, and simply use plain regexp for parts of html that you're interested in.

Answer 2

You don't want to try to parse HTML with a regex. Try HTML::TreeBuilder instead.

use HTML::TreeBuilder;

my $html = HTML::TreeBuilder->new_from_file('file.html');
# or some other method, depending on where your HTML is

doReplace($html);

sub doReplace
{
  my $elt = shift;

  foreach my $node ($elt->content_refs_list) {
    if (ref $$node) {
      doReplace($$node) unless $$node->tag eq 'a';
    } else {
      $$node =~ s/text/replacement/g;
    } # end else this is a text node
  } # end foreach $node

} # end doReplace

Answer 3

I have temporarily prevailed:

$html =~ s|(text)([^<>]*?<)(?!\/a>)|replacement$2|is;

but I was dispirited, dismayed, and enervated by the seminal text; and so shall pursue Treebuilder in subsequent endeavors.