note McDarren Thanks :) <p>Actually, I've never used [cpan://WWW::Mechanize], so it didn't occur to me to try that. The routine I use for scraping the data from the Monk homenodes is given below. I think the main performance hit is the fact that I need to issue a separate request for each Monk. Ideally, it would be good to be able to grab all this information in a single go. But I'm not aware of any way that this is currently possible. <code> sub get_monk_stats { my $ref = shift; my $monk_url = 'http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id='; my %monk_fields = ( 'User since:' => 1, 'Last here:' => 1, 'Experience:' => 1, 'Level:' => 1, 'Writeups:' => 1, ); MONK: foreach my $id (keys %{$ref}) { print "Getting data for $ref->{$id}{name} ($id)\n"; my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new(); my $req = HTTP::Request->new(GET=>"$monk_url$id"); my $result = $ua->request($req); next MONK if !$result->is_success; my $content = $result->content; my $p = HTML::TokeParser->new(\$content); while (my $tag = $p->get_tag("td")) { my $text = $p->get_trimmed_text("/td"); if ($monk_fields{$text}) { $p->get_tag("td"); $ref->{$id}{$text} = $p->get_trimmed_text("/td"); } } } return $ref; } </code> 558846 558944