Re:^2 (nrd) Extracting attributes from anchor tags in an HTML page

[newrisedesigns]

in reply to Re: Extracting href's
in thread Extracting href's

No offense to andye (still good advice), but parsing HTML with a regexp is a bad idea.

Stick with a tried-and true module. It is far less likely to break on you (usually due to bad HTML, not code) and allows for further learning.

Take for example HTML::TokeParser:

my $content = get($url);
my $ref = \$content;
my $p = HTML::TokeParser->new($ref);
my $token;
while ($token = $p->get_tag("a")) {
    my $href = $token->[1]{href};
    my $text = $p->get_trimmed_text("/a");
    print "$href => $text";
}
## Should work...

This looks intimitating, and it is. :) However, by learning how to use modules like TokeParser you'll not only get a better handle on what you want to do, but you'll be learning more about Perl, as well.

Also, if you plan on doing this often, I suggest picking up a copy of Perl & LWP. It's a good resource for interacting with websites.

John J Reiser
newrisedesigns.com