Matching Text On a Web link

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

Hi Monks,

I think this is probably a simple question but I am learning how to use WWW::Mechanize and I am not sure how to structure my conditional statement. The page is structured in a table like so:

Row 1     Row 2
Paper      Download[url]
Journal    Download[url]
Poster     Download[url]
Paper      Download[url]
Paper      Download[url]
Paper      Download[url]
Journal    Download[url]

In HTML:
<tr  align="left">
<td>Paper</td>
<td><a href="url">[Download]</a></td>
<tr  align="left">
<td>Journal</td>
<td><a href="url">[Download]</a></td>
<tr  align="left">
<td>Poster</td>
<td><a href="url">[Download]</a></td>

etc...

<tr  align="left">
<td>Paper</td>
<td><a href="url">[Download]</a></td>
[download]

How would I match $mech -> follow_link (....) to follow the download link on the text "paper"?

Any insight is always much appreciated.

Thank you!

Comment on Matching Text On a Web link Download Code

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Re: Matching Text On a Web link by Anonymous Monk on Apr 11, 2014 at 21:59 UTC
:) You wouldn't :) follow_link does matching on `<a href="url"> description </a>` only If you want to associate table text, you'd use $mech->content with HTML::TableParser or HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath or XML::LibXML Combine with xpather.pl and htmltreexpather.pl and SMOP :)	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Matching Text On a Web link by doubleqq (Acolyte) on Apr 11, 2014 at 22:13 UTC
Thank you! This is tremendously helpful.	[reply]