HTML Parser suggestions

[spatterson]

Fellow monks, I'm returning to perl after a long absence with a need to parse some autogenerated HTML - in a tree based fashion & searching for specific class attributes on tags.

As there are loads of HTML parsing modules, which ones do fellow monks suggest?

[tobyink]

I'm biased, but I'll suggest HTML::HTML5::Parser. It uses the HTML5 parsing algorithm, so if faced with messy tag soup HTML, should very closely match how most desktop browsers parse HTML.

Quick example:

use 5.010;
use strict;
use warnings;

use HTML::HTML5::Parser;
use XML::LibXML::QuerySelector;

my @elements = HTML::HTML5::Parser::
    -> load_html(location => "http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=101298
+0")
    -> querySelectorAll("title");

say for @elements;

[moritz]

I kinda like Mojo::DOM. It allows you to search for HTML tags with CSS selectors.

A typical example would be

use 5.010;
use Mojo::DOM;
my $dom = Mojo::DOM->new($html_string);
$dom->find('div.your_attribute)->each(sub {
    say shift->all_text;
});

[LanX]

parsing HTML is a frequently asked topic and I suppose it can't be answered w/o more details about your specific problems.

searching the monastery shows plenty of discussions, maybe you wanna dig in and ask again?

EDIT: A quick look seems to suggest that HTML::TreeBuilder is popular.

[blue_cowdawg]

As there are loads of HTML parsing modules, which ones do fellow monks suggest?

I've used HTML::Parser a few times.

[Anonymous Monk]

See also htmltreexpather.pl , Parsing HTML / Re^4: Parsing HTML, A regex question , NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day / Re: NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day , Re: Extracting HTML content between the h tags, Re^2: Help With Online Table Scraper, Re^4: web::scraper using an xpath, ....