HTML::Tokeparser and $attr problem

[dannoura]

hi,

I'm trying to print out the href attribute of all links in a document but not succeeding for some reason. I keep getting the error:

Can't use string ("</a>")as a HASH ref while strict refs in use

It's probably some stupid mistake but I'm new to HTML::TokeParser and perl so bear with me. The code is:

#! c:\perl\bin -w

use strict;

use HTML::TokeParser;
my $p = HTML::TokeParser->new(shift||die);

while (my $token = $p->get_token) {
    print $token->[2]{'href'}, "\n" if ($token->[1] eq 'a');
    }

And the relevant part of the html is:

 <td nowrap> <font size="-1"><a href="/home.cfm" target="_top" class="
+novisit">Home</a>
         &nbsp;|&nbsp;<a href="/SpecimenSearch.cfm" target="_top" clas
+s="novisit">Specimen&nbsp;Search</a>

[Mr. Muskrat]

You are not checking the token type. You only want to check the starting 'a' tag.

#! c:\perl\bin -w

use strict;

use HTML::TokeParser;
my $p = HTML::TokeParser->new(shift||die);

while (my $token = $p->get_token) {
  print $token->[2]{'href'}, "\n" if ($token->[0] eq 'S' && $token->[1
+] eq 'a');
}

[dannoura]

Thanks. That did it.

[Rex(Wrecks)]

I see you got a solution, I just thought I would point out that I recently needed to learn HTML::TokeParser as well and found the HTML::TokeParser Tutorial to be very valuable and accurate.

I have also found the Tutorials page to be a nice place to go when RTFM has not helped.

Heh, don't get me wrong, I am not trying to get you not to post here, just presenting a resource many here forget about.

[Ovid]

You can make this problem easier to solve by switching to HTML::TokeParser::Simple. (Disclaimer: I wrote it)

use strict;

use HTML::TokeParser::Simple;
my $p = HTML::TokeParser::Simple->new(shift||die);

while (my $token = $p->get_token) {
    print $token->return_attr('href'), "\n"
        if $token->is_start_tag('a');
}

Note that the module is a drop-in replacement for HTML::TokeParser. If you switch to it, your code will function exactly the same and you can simply rewrite the messy bits.