I spent 36 years programming before I stopped and read the seminal book “Mastering Regular Expressions” by Friedl. Prior to that I always took a deep breath and prepared for battle when I had to solve a programming problem using regular expressions.
Today's challenge: How do you change stuff like this -
<p class="headc" id="book1_III"><b>III. S<small>ÜHNE</small> und Wunder</b></p>
to this -
<ihead> <inr>III.</inr> <ih>S<small>ÜHNE</small> und Wunder</ih> </ihead>
Answer:
s/<p class="headc"\s+id="book[^"]+"><b>([^.]+?)\.\s*([^<]+)(<small>[^<]+<\/small>)*([^<]*)<\/b><\/p>/<ihead>\n <inr>$1.<\/inr> <ih>$2$3$4<\/ih>\n<\/ihead>/g
And if any of those characters is wrong or misplaced in that spaghetti mess above, it won't work.
Hence:
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems. -Jamie Zawinski
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