Yeah, parsing HTML is a royal pain. All of the mixing of content and presentation. Ack. If only more people would use CSS to describe the markup semantically. For example, if the home node's had tables that looked like this:

<table class='adfu'> ... </table>
...
<table class='body'>
  <table class='userdata'> ... </table>
</table>
[download]

Then it would be dead easy to rip through the html and grab whatever section you want (not that I'm complaining -- I haven't even put in a suggestion or anythin'.) It would also make theming the site simpler as all you'd need to do is pass around a couple of style sheets.

Anyhow, I think I'm drifting Off Topic.

Given this problem, I would use LWP::Simple and HTML::Parser (which I find more generally useful than HTML::TreeBuilder, although you might also want to check out HTML::SimpleParse) What we've got to do is examine the html source and discover the meaning embedded within the page's structure. (By the way, for this reason, I think it's almost always better to work with raw rather than interpreted html.)

In this case, getting the user data from the home node turns out to be pretty easy. All you need to do is grab the data out of the sixth table in the html. Here's a start:

use LWP::Simple;
use HTML::Parser;

my $monk = $ARGV[0] || 'eg';

my $content = get("http://perlmonks.org/?node=$monk");

my $tables_seen = 0;
my $in_user_table = 0;
my $parser = HTML::Parser->new(
        start_h => [
                sub {
                        if ( $_[0] eq 'table' ) {
                                $in_user_table = 1 if ++$tables_seen =
+= 6;
                        }
                }, 
                "tagname" ],
        end_h => [
                sub {
                        $in_user_table = 0 if $_[0] eq 'table';
                },
                "tagname" ],
        text_h => [
                sub {
                        print @_ if $in_user_table;
                },
                "dtext" ],
        );

$parser->parse( $content );
$parser->eof;
[download]

The anonymous subs in start_h, stop_h and text_h are event handlers that are called when the parser encounters a start-element tag, a end-element tag and text, respectively. The string after the anonymous subs specifies what sort of argument the handlers receive.

What needs to be done now is to change the start, stop and text handlers to put the user data into a hash (note that for every table row, the key is in the first <td> and the value is in the second).

HTH.

Brethren, if I ascend slopes of lofty Mt. CPAN, will I find my answer among the archives of the scriptures there?

Like HTML::TableExtract, perhaps?

    --k.

Table parsing is a pain in the 4ss. I love that particular message-- especially since it does nothing to even extract the text from the target. For ultra-simple parsing I replace all td end tags with a spacer and all tr end tags with a newline.

You can use HTML::Parser, or you can use HTML::TokeParser (which is a little easier, imho, to get started with-- and is basically a wrapper on the HTML::Parser module). With it you can simply $page->get_token() until you get to a text token which matches your "User Since:" test. Then you can pull all the text tokens until you get to either a tag or a text signal that you are done with the user info (and/or custom) portion of the node. And then exit the parse routine.