Using Perl to strip everything from a string except HTML Anchor Links

Question

Using Perl, how can I use a regex to take a string that has random HTML in it with one HTML link with anchor, like this:

  <a href="http://example.com" target="_blank">Whatever Example</a>

and it leave ONLY that and get rid of everything else? No matter what was inside the href attribute with the <a, like title=, or style=, or whatever. and it leave the anchor: "Whatever Example" and the </a>?

Answer 1

You can take advantage of a stream parser such as HTML::TokeParser::Simple:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use HTML::TokeParser::Simple;

my $html = <<EO_HTML;

Using Perl, how can I use a regex to take a string that has random HTML in it
with one HTML link with anchor, like this:

   <a href="http://example.com" target="_blank">Whatever <i>Interesting</i> Example</a>

       and it leave ONLY that and get rid of everything else? No matter what
   was inside the href attribute with the <a, like title=, or style=, or
   whatever. and it leave the anchor: "Whatever Example" and the </a>?
EO_HTML

my $parser = HTML::TokeParser::Simple->new(string => $html);

while (my $tag = $parser->get_tag('a')) {
    print $tag->as_is, $parser->get_text('/a'), "</a>\n";
}

Output:

$ ./whatever.pl
<a href="http://example.com" target="_blank">Whatever Interesting Example</a>