I wonder if any of you could help me out with a string manipulation
prolem I'm having, by way of code or helpful pointers?  What I'm wanting
to do is this:

I have a string such as '$phrase="this is a book"', and what I'd like to
do is wrap an html tag around it such as '<span id="bk">this is a
book</span>'.  The only problem is that I'm reading lines from an HTML
file, and whereas I'd like to wrap that tag around any text, I don't
want it going inside any tags already in the line, such as '<img
src="book1.gif" border=0 alt="<span...>this is a book</span> cover"
width=10 heigth=20>' would be a very bad thing.

I know how to substitute strings as in:
'$line=~s/$phrase/<span..>$phrase<\/span>/ig;' but I don't know how to
check to see if that $phrase is in a tag or not, and still output the
full $line (tags and all).

For example, the input line might be:

<td align="center"><img src="1.gif" alt="a book">This is a book.  And in
a book like this there are words.</td>

the $phrase="a book" so the output should be:

<td align="center"><img src="1.gif" alt="a book">This is <span id="bk">a
book</span>.  And in <span id="bk">a book</span> like this there are
words.</td>

If you can help at all I would really appreciate it.  Thanks very much!

Andy

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Tom Phoenix       Perl Training and Hacking       Esperanto
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