Regular Expressions - Help me ??

[WMitchellCPQ]

Hi i need to remove a navigation table (nav table) in a large number of files. How do I construct a reg exp so that the table will be remove this. The contents of the table vary from file to file.

<table id="NavTable>
 Varying text here 
<some tags>

</table>

Thanks in advance

 

[cntr]

awk '/^<table id="NavTable">/,/<\/table>/{next}1' infile >outfile

 

[missbarbell]

$text =~ s!<table id="NavTable">.*?</table>!!gs;

Where $text is the complete html text in a single string. This also assumes that inside the table tags for NavTable there are no other tables. Otherwise it could be very tricky. You may want to look at HTML::Tree (1) if that is the case.

(1) [URL unfurl="true"]http://search.cpan.org/dist/HTML-Tree/lib/HTML/Tree.pm[/url]

Barbie
Leader of Birmingham Perl Mongers

http://birmingham.pm.org

 

[cntr]

If the NavTable can contain tables:

Ruby:

class String
  # Like split(), but includes matching substrings.
  def shatter( re )
    self.gsub( re, "\1"+'\&'+"\1" ).split("\1")
  end
end

outtext='';   depth=0
# text is a string containing the whole file.
text.shatter( /<\/?table[^>]*>/ ).each{ |s|
  if s =~ /<table id="NavTable">/
    depth += 1
  else
    depth += (depth>0 ? 1 : 0)  if s =~ /<table/
  end
  outtext += s  if 0==depth
  depth -= (depth>0 ? 1 : 0)  if s =~ /<\/table>/
}