[ILUG] Hairy regexp question

[Kae Verens]

Niall O Broin wrote:
> I'd like to be able to extract   'Joe Bloggs'  from this:
>
> <span class="label"><span class="highlight"><span 
> class="highlight-inner"></span></span>
> <span title="offline" class="name presence-offline">Joe 
> Bloggs</span><ul class="profile-links">
> <li class="view-profile first"><a href="/users/joebloggs" title="View 
> user profile">
> View profile</a></li>
> <li class="view-blog"><a href="/blog/88" title="View blog">View 
> blog</a></li>
> <li class="add-contact"><a 
> href="/relationship/88/request?destination=dashboard%2Flatest-activity" 
> title="Add to your contacts"> Add associate</a></li>
> <li class="send-message last"><a href="/" title="Initiate a chat 
> conversation with Joe Bloggs" 
> onclick="javascript:Drupal.xmppclient.message_chat(&#039;joe.blogs at whatever.com&#039;);;return 
> false;">Initiate chat</a></li>
> </ul></span></span>
>
> i.e. I need to extract the value from the first tag which DOESN'T have 
> any enclosed tags.
>
> Now, I could write some code to do this in Perl or Ruby, but I'd like 
> to be able to do it with a pure RE if it can be done.
s/.*class="name presence-offline">\([^<]*\)<.*/\1/m

or am I missing something here?

kae