Please note: This is not about loss of XP. I'm burden with what is almost an embarrassment of riches where XP is concerned and whilst I disagree with the usual "XP and a quid* will buy you a coffee at MacDonald's" quote in as much as XP usually brings a smile to my face whereas Mac's coffee never does, I see it as a fun inducement to posting and membership, and somemeasure of other monk's approval for your efforts and little more.

I the absence of any other explanation, I thought the only reason for down voting a piece of simple, working code was that it went against the party line by not using an HTML::X module, so I thought I would have a go at doing the same thing the "proper" way.

First thing to do was to decide which of the HTML modules to use. AS 5.6.1 which I'm currently using comes with a host of these as standard so I thought I would start with one of those--but which one?

AsSubs

functions that construct a HTML syntax tree.

No good, this calls for de-construction if anything

Element

Class for objects that represent HTML elements -

10 minutes reading to confirm its for construction.

 - traverse

discussion of HTML::Element's traverse method

Just more about the above

Entities

Encode or decode strings with HTML entities

Nope.

Filter

Filter HTML text through the parser

This module is deprecated. HTML::Parser now provides the functionally of HTML::Filter

Skip ahead to HTML::Parser

Form

It's not a form.

HeadParser

Not interested in the HEAD :^)

LinkExtor

Most of the info isn't links.

Parse

Deprecated.

Parser

HTML parser class....SYNOPSIS use HTML::Parser (); Useful!

Objects of the HTML::Parser class will recognize markup and separate it from plain text (alias data content) in HTML documents. As different kinds of markup and text are recognized, the corresponding event handlers are invoked.

Hmmm. But I'm not interested in the markup, only the content.

If event driven parsing does not feel right for your application, you might want to use HTML::PullParser

Read on gungadin maybe it's just what you need..... 10 minutes later. Nope. To use this I need to find a way to determine when I am called back with the content I'm after, but the content is in one block of 20 or so nearly identical blocks, each containing the same sequence of nested tag groups, each of which contains one bit of the content I am after. That means devising a state machine for the whole 128k, 1930 line web page to record what I have seen so I will know when I get called with the bits I want. And of course, if they add a group above me, or move to using style sheets instead of font tags or add or remove a field from the displayed content, I have to start over. So....I won't be doing it that way. They mention HTML::PullParser

PullParser

Alternative HTML::Parser interface

You associate a file (or any IO::Handle object or string) with the parser at construction time and then repeatedly call $parser->get_token to obtain the tags and text found in the parsed document

Sounds possible. Pass the string with the HTML, sit in a loop searching for ?something?, then keep pulling the next token, compare it with the next thing I looking for push the content to my array.

Of course, its still going to rely upon the web-page not changing layouts and given the layout of the html, its going to be impossible to determine programmatically if they have added or removed a field as most of the don't have a handy tag by which they can be isolated.

Tagset

Basically a utility module for HTML::Element or HTML::TreeBuilder

TokeParser

Alternative HTML::Parser interface

An alternative interface, but no easier to use from what I could see after 10 minutes of reading.

Tree

Seems very powerful, but after an hour of reading the docs, I didn't see anything that would make it especially easy to locate one nearly identical row of a table from the 20+ other rows of data. I could count of course, but it looks to me like the page itself is generated and if one of the sites it examines is down. it will simply omit it's row in the table , then the counting method goes out the window.

 - AboutObjects

More of the same

 - AboutTrees

More of the same

 - Scanning

More of the same

TreeBuilder

More of the same

Well, here I am 3 hours later and the only one that seemed like it might work for this, without a huge learning curve and gobs of code, is HTML::PullParser, so here goes start simple.

#! perl -sw
use strict;
use LWP::Simple;
use HTML::PullParser;
use Data::Dumper;

#my $html = get("http://pvpgnservers.ath.cx");
my $html = do{local $/; <>; };

my $p= HTML::PullParser->new( doc => \$html );

print Dumper($p);
[download]

Start by checking the syntax Perl -c. Code compiles clean. Run this on a local copy of the html and it produces

C:\test>202414-2 202414.htm
Info not collected for any events at C:\test\202414-2.pl line 23

C:\test>
[download]

I wonder what that means. Look for a error code section: Nothing. Ok, look for an examples section... it has one...

EXAMPLES

The 'eg/hform' script shows how we might parse the form section of HTM
+L::Documents using HTML::PullParser.
[download]

That's it? ... Yes! That is IT! Nothing.

Okay, I noticed that it referred me back to the HTML::Parser docs earlier, see what that produces. It has a Diagnostics section, and there are quite a few error messages listed with explanations. But not

Info not collected for any events at C:\test\202414-2.pl line 23

Something else I just noticed. C:\test\202414-2.pl is my script allright, but its only has 13 lines!! Unlucky for me I guess.

Sod this for a game of soldiers. Maybe, just maybe, if I needed to do this, and I needed to re-write the HTML, or I needed to utilise the structure of the HTML for some purpose, maybe it would be worth pursuing this, but I don't and it ain't. So there.