http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=974907


in reply to Parsing HTML

I would use XPath or CSS expressions, and look at HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath to run the expressions against the HTML. Or rather, I would use App::scrape, which puts that approach into a module, or Web::Scraper and Web::Magic.

With XPath expressions, you can specify the elements you want like paths to files in a directory. In your case, it looks like the following XPath expressions would work:

# Each voyage
//p[@class="itinerari-info"]

# Itinerary within a voyage
./span[1]

# Departure date
./span[2]

# Ship
./span[3]

...

[download]

Depending on whether your target page only lists one such itinerary, you can roll the XPath expressions into one expression, instead of using them relative to the voyage nodes:

# Itinerary
//p[@class="itinerari-info"]/span[1]

...

[download]

You can test out these queries in Firebug (I think), or with scrape-ff tool in WWW::Mechanize::Firefox, or with the scrape tool in App::scrape. Likely, Mojolicious and the modules mentioned before also contain tools for easy command line testing of XPath expressions against URLs.

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