Emulation of lex like functionality in Perl or Python

Question

Here\'s the deal. Is there a way to have strings tokenized in a line based on multiple regexes?

One example:

I have to get all href tags, their corresponding

Answer 1

Modifying Bruno's example to include error checking:

my $input = "...";
while (1) {
    if ($input =~ /\G(\w+)/gc) { print "word: '$1'\n"; next }
    if ($input =~ /\G(\s+)/gc) { print "whitespace: '$1'\n"; next }

    if ($input !~ /\G\z/gc)  { print "tokenizing error at character " . pos($input) . "\n" }
    print "done!\n"; last;
}

(Note that using scalar //g is unfortunately the one place where you really can't avoid using the $1, etc. variables.)