Using HTML::TableExtract cell method

[halweitz]

In the code snippet below everything seems to work fine.
The HTML file is a saved web page with a table.
The HTML sting is parsed correctly into $tree2.
$table1 is extracted from $tree2 and
the $row_cnt varible is set correctly to 111 rows.
However, the $table->cell($i, 9) method returns
the following when I print the contents of $cell1:

111 rows found
start the row loop
check opening date cell in row: 1
cell1 --> HTML::ElementTable::DataElement=HASH(0x2e4b6ec)

It should return a date like 02-25-2013 but never does.
How do I get a string instead of a hash?
Any thoughts will help.

#!perl -w
use HTML::TableExtract qw(tree);
use File::Slurp qw( :all ) ;
$date = '02-25-2013';
$Path = 'C://path//to//File.htm';
$html_string = read_file($Path);
my $tree2 = HTML::TableExtract->new( 
        keep_html => 1,
        headers => [qw(NSN)],
        slice_columns => 0,
        keep_headers => 0,
        gridmap => 0,
        strip_html_on_match => 1,
        debug => 1,
        decode => 1
        );
$tree2->parse($html_string);
$table1 = $tree2->first_table_found;
my @rows = $table1->rows;
my $row_cnt = @rows;
print "$row_cnt rows found \n";
my $cell1;
my $i = 1; # row number, skip the header row
print "start the row loop \n";
while ($i < $row_cnt ) {
   print "checking date in cell 9 in row: $i \n";
   my $cell1 = $table1->cell($i, 9); #row $i, column 9
   print "cell1 --> $cell1 \n";
   next if $cell1 !~ /$date/;      # not today
#
# there is more code that does not
# appear here to save some data from the row
# to a file
#
}
continue {
   $i++;
}

[vinoth.ree]

Hi halweitz,

My suggestion is just print the content of @rows with the Data::Dumper and find whether you have the date field in rows or not.

[halweitz]

Thanks for the response. I found the problem. When I removed the

qw(tree)

from

use HTML::TableExtract qw(tree);

the text for the date is correct.