HTML::Tree::Scanning 3.23

HTML::Tree::Scanning contains an article: "Scanning HTML".

SYNOPSIS

# This an article, not a module.

The following article by Sean M. Burke first appeared in The Perl Journal #19 and is copyright 2000 The Perl Journal. It appears courtesy of Jon Orwant and The Perl Journal. This document may be distributed under the same terms as Perl itself.

Scanning HTML

-- Sean M. Burke

In The Perl Journal issue 17, Ken MacFarlanes article "Parsing HTML with HTML::Parser" describes how the HTML::Parser module scans HTML source as a stream of start-tags, end-tags, text, comments, etc. In TPJ #18, my "Trees" article kicked around the idea of tree-shaped data structures. Now Ill try to tie it together, in a discussion of HTML trees.

The CPAN module HTML::TreeBuilder takes the tags that HTML::Parser picks out, and builds a parse tree -- a tree-shaped network of objects...

Footnote: And if you need a quick explanation of objects, see my TPJ17 article "A Users View of Object-Oriented Modules"; or go whole hog and get Damian Conways excellent book Object-Oriented Perl, from Manning Publications.

...representing the structured content of the HTML document. And once the document is parsed as a tree, youll find the common tasks of extracting data from that HTML document/tree to be quite straightforward.