[ILUG] Hairy regexp question

[Niall O Broin]

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.


Niall