How to properly go through a WWW::Mechanize::Link object?

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

Hello Perl Monks, My usage of Perl has been light, I've never studied it. If I needed to do something I looked how to do that specific task and moved on. But I've hit a hurdle with WWW::Mechanize::Link. I have no problem with the beginning part:

 my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
 $mech->get( $url );
 my @links = $mech->links();
 print Dumper (@links);
[download]

And with the Dumper I can see all the data in there, including the parts I want (i.e. specific links). What I cannot figure out how to do is to cast those arrays in @links into individual WWW::Mechanize::Link objects and loop through them. I've tried nested foreach loops, but in the end I just come up with a mess. Each new array just has more arrays, and sometimes a hash reference that I can't dereference. I figure that there must be a proper way. Any hints would be appreciated. Thank you

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Re: How to properly go through a WWW::Mechanize::Link object? by Corion (Patriarch) on Apr 23, 2020 at 06:14 UTC
Have you looked at WWW::Mechanize::Link? You have the list of links in your array `@links`. To get at the first link, you can use `$links[0]`. `my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new(); $mech->get( $url ); my @links = $mech->links(); print sprintf "I have %d links\n", 0+@links; for my $link (@links) { print "One link points to " . $link->url; print "\n"; };` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: How to properly go through a WWW::Mechanize::Link object? by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Apr 23, 2020 at 07:28 UTC
What Corion said. The `@links` are WWW::Mechanize::Link objects already– `use WWW::Mechanize; my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new( autocheck => 0 ); $mech->get("https://perlmonks.org/?node=Recently+Active+Threads"); for my $link ( $mech->links ) { printf "* %s\n -> %s\n", $link->text, $link->url_abs; }` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: How to properly go through a WWW::Mechanize::Link object? by SergioQ (Scribe) on Apr 23, 2020 at 22:03 UTC
First off, thank you. But this opens something that I've missed in Perl. What I was doing was: `print "name\t\t$link->name\n";` Which gave me: name WWW::Mechanize::Link=ARRAY(0x55bbd8e7d100)->name So what am I not understanding? Why does Perl not interpret this?	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: How to properly go through a WWW::Mechanize::Link object? by hippo (Archbishop) on Apr 23, 2020 at 22:16 UTC
Method calls don't interpolate. Nor do subroutine calls or indeed anything other than simple variables and their dereferences. See the FAQ: How do I expand function calls in a string? for alternatives and workarounds. Update: and also How can I expand variables in text strings? for good measure.	[reply]
Re: How to properly go through a WWW::Mechanize::Link object? by marto (Cardinal) on Apr 23, 2020 at 07:32 UTC
In addition to what Corion said, see WWW::Mechanize::Cookbook/WWW::Mechanize::Examples. Alternatively, depending on exactly what you want to do Mojo::DOM/Mojo::UserAgent are great fun to work with, supporting CSS selectors. Examples Batch remove URLs/Re^2: running an example script with WWW::Mechanize* module, Super Search for more.	[reply]
Re: How to properly go through a WWW::Mechanize::Link object? by choroba (Cardinal) on Apr 23, 2020 at 13:54 UTC
I usually don't want all the links, but only specific ones. WWW::Mechanize has a method for that: `my $links = $mech->find_link(text_regex => qr/Read more/, url_regex => + qr{domain\.com} ); for my $link (@$links) { ...` [download] `map{substr$_->[0],$_->[1]\|\|0,1}[\\|\|{},3],[[]],[ref qr-1,-,-1],[{}],[sub{}^ARGV,3]`	[reply] [d/l] [select]