HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath (3pm)

  use HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath;
  my $tree= HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath->new;
  $tree->parse_file( "mypage.html");
  my $nb=$tree->findvalue( '/html/body//p[@class="section_title"]/span[@class="nb"]');
  my $id=$tree->findvalue( '/html/body//p[@class="section_title"]/@id');

  my $p= $html->findnodes( '//p[@id="toto"]')->[0];
  my $link_texts= $p->findvalue( './a'); # the texts of all a elements in $p
  $tree->delete; # to avoid memory leaks, if you parse many HTML documents

This module adds typical XPath methods to HTML::TreeBuilder, to make it easy to query a document.

Extra methods added both to the tree object and to each element:

findnodes ($path)

Returns a list of nodes found by $path. In scalar context returns an \*(C`Tree::XPathEngine::NodeSet\*(C' object.

findnodes_as_string ($path)

Returns the text values of the nodes, as one string.

findnodes_as_strings ($path)

Returns a list of the values of the result nodes.

findvalue ($path)

Returns either a \*(C`Tree::XPathEngine::Literal\*(C', a \*(C`Tree::XPathEngine::Boolean\*(C' or a \*(C`Tree::XPathEngine::Number\*(C' object. If the path returns a NodeSet, $nodeset->xpath_to_literal is called automatically for you (and thus a \*(C`Tree::XPathEngine::Literal\*(C' is returned). Note that for each of the objects stringification is overloaded, so you can just print the value found, or manipulate it in the ways you would a normal perl value (e.g. using regular expressions).

findvalues ($path)

Returns the values of the matching nodes as a list. This is mostly the same as findnodes_as_strings, except that the elements of the list are objects (with overloaded stringification) instead of plain strings.

exists ($path)

Returns true if the given path exists.

matches($path)

Returns true if the element matches the path.

find ($path)

The find function takes an XPath expression (a string) and returns either a Tree::XPathEngine::NodeSet object containing the nodes it found (or empty if no nodes matched the path), or one of XML::XPathEngine::Literal (a string), XML::XPathEngine::Number, or XML::XPathEngine::Boolean. It should always return something - and you can use ->isa() to find out what it returned. If you need to check how many nodes it found you should check $nodeset->size. See XML::XPathEngine::NodeSet.

as_XML_compact

HTML::TreeBuilder's \*(C`as_XML\*(C' output is not really nice to look at, so I added a new method, that can be used as a simple replacement for it. It escapes only the '<', '>' and '&' (plus '"' in attribute values), and wraps \s-1CDATA\s0 elements in \s-1CDATA\s0 sections.

Note that the \s-1XML\s0 is actually not garanteed to be valid at this point. Nothing is done about the encoding of the string. Patches or just ideas of how it could work are welcome.

as_XML_indented

Same as as_XML, except that the output is indented.

HTML::TreeBuilder

XML::XPathEngine

https://github.com/mirod/HTML\*(--TreeBuilder--XPath <https://github.com/mirod/HTML--TreeBuilder--XPath>

Michel Rodriguez, <[email protected]>

Copyright (C) 2006-2011 by Michel Rodriguez

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.8.4 or, at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.