Re^6: Extracting span and meta content with HTML::TreeBuilder

[wrinkles]

poj,

Yes, that's perfect, thank you!

The docs on the HTML::TB::XP module is not sufficient (at least for me) to understand how your code works. Where is the documentation that would help me understand this? Did you go to some key documentation to help you sort this out? What do you recommend for me to understand this?

[Anonymous Monk]

See all the links here Re: Retrieve select information from HTML, they're examples(for tree-xpath and others)/walkthroughs/tutorials ... tools like xpather.pl/htmltreexpather.pl can give you paths to start with

findnodes gives you nodes ... or in case of treebuilder it gives HTML::Element object you can call methods on ... the other player gives XML::LibXML::Node be they XML::LibXML::Element or something else (libxml follows the DOM closely)

This tutorial needs javascript http://zvon.org/comp/r/tut-XPath_1.html

On the file you provided xpather spits out stuff like this

/html/body/div/div/span

# posy
/html[1]/body[1]/div[1]/div[1]/span[1]

# star
/*[ local-name() = "html"
    and position() = 1
  ]

/*[ local-name() = "body"
    and position() = 1
  ]

/*[ local-name() = "div"
    and position() = 1
    and @class = "review-content"
  ]

/*[ local-name() = "div"
    and position() = 1
    and @class = "biz-rating biz-rating-very-large clearfix"
  ]

/*[ local-name() = "span"
    and @class = "rating-qualifier"
    and contains(string(), "                1/13/2011     ")
  ]


# rats
/html[1]
 /body[1]
 /*[ name() = "div" and position() = 1 and @class = "review-content" ]
 /*[ name() = "div" and position() = 1 and @class = "biz-rating biz-ra
+ting-very-large clearfix" ]
 /*[ name() = "span" and position() = 1 and @class = "rating-qualifier
+" ]

Its a tree :) so  //meta means find a  <meta> anywhere where as  /foo/meta means find every child meta of root element foo <foo><meta></meta>....</foo>

The examples/tuts give more better examples and explanations