To the OP: Without having the time to test myself at the moment, what stevieb suggested should work; you can also choose a different action to take with a more complex statement like if ( defined $obj ) { ... } else { ... }. Note that 'div.abstract-content > p' || 'not provided' is actually not doing anything useful, as it's just a logical or and the first value is always true, so the second value will always be ignored.