Date: 2010jun29 Language: perl Q. In perl, how can I parse XML and HTML without using a libary or module? A. Use non-greedy matches. And the s g options. For example, if you have a RSS feed which is XML with multiple <item>'s. Do this:

@a = $content =~ m|\<item\>(.*?)\</item\>|sg; foreach $i (@a) { print "item=$i\n"; }

Here is what's happening: We use | to delimit the match so we don't have to escape the / The .* matches any character(s). Adding the ? makes it non-greedy so we get each <item> at a time. Because <item> is any characters. The s option folds several lines together. So this works if there are newlines. The g option gets all (global) matches.