help with some parsing

AI Cowboy has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

hey all, I'm a new guy here, but I seem to have run into a problem: I am trying out new ways for a robot I'm making to learn, and I need to figure out how to parse (pars? parse?) a web page so I only get what text I want, for example, a Wikipedia page, I only want the page contents, not the "log in here" or "forgot your password?" things, and I am at a loss. could you help me out?

Comment on help with some parsing

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Re: help with some parsing by CountZero (Bishop) on May 27, 2009 at 21:07 UTC
Hail and welcome to the Monastery! Did you already take a look at WWW::Robot or WWW::Spyder? For parsing of HTML-pages, HTML::Parser or HTML::Parser::Simple are interesting. CountZero A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James	[reply]
Re^2: help with some parsing by AI Cowboy (Beadle) on May 27, 2009 at 21:30 UTC
I have not, however I will take a look at the HTML parser things. Thanks much! AI Cowboy	[reply]
Re: help with some parsing by zwon (Abbot) on May 27, 2009 at 21:45 UTC
For wikipedia you don't need any robots. You can download the whole wikipedia database from http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/	[reply]
Re^2: help with some parsing by AI Cowboy (Beadle) on May 28, 2009 at 02:33 UTC
thats an even better thing, and I cannot tell you how happy this makes me!!!! thank you so much! I will still use the other method, for other sites, such as etiquette sites or something, but thanks!	[reply]

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