[DaGuy]

I'm just parsing throught the XML file that one gets from exporting a playlist from iTunes.

See the snipplet below. How do I extract any kinds of characters between the <string> tags? As is, the regex skips over white spaces and other not alphanumeric characters.

Code:
$stuff="playlist1.xml";

open STUFF, $stuff or die "Cannot open $stuff for read :$!";

while (<STUFF>) {
        
        if(/<key>Artist<\/key><string>(\w+)<\/string>/){
        	print "Line $. is : $_";
        	print "$1\n"
        }
        
}

I can probably hammer this with a SAX parser but I want to learn how to do it by just using regular expressions.

Thanks!

[neilw]

The \w in the regex matches word characters; if you want to match anything, then just use dot (.). Dot matches any character.

In other words:

Code:
if(/<key>Artist<\/key><string>(.*)<\/string>/){

And I'm using ".*" instead of ".+" just in case there's no artist, and there's nothing in between <string> and </string>. In that case your match will just be a null string.

Er, maybe you don't want to match in that situation, in which case go back to ".+".

[DaGuy]

Awesome! Thanks very much.