Find and replace specific elements with HTML::TreeBuilder

mldvx4 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have a rats' nest of div elements that I would like to replace, content, sub elements and all, with a single comment. I can almost do it with the code below, but the comment gets escaped as  I would like it to use real tags:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;
use HTML::TreeBuilder;

my $root = HTML::TreeBuilder->new_from_file(\*DATA);

my $footer = $root->look_down(
    _tag  => q{div},
    id    => q{footer},
    );

$footer->replace_with('<!-- foobar -->');

print $root->as_HTML(undef, "  ");

__DATA__
<div id="quiteok">ok</div>
<div id="footer">
 bad
 <div>
  stuff
  <div>
   and lots of it
  </div>
 </div>
</div>
<div>
 something good
</div>
[download]

Comment on Find and replace specific elements with HTML::TreeBuilder Download Code

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Re: Find and replace specific elements with HTML::TreeBuilder by Tux (Canon) on May 08, 2016 at 11:53 UTC
From the docs of HTML::Element: `Comment pseudo-elements These are element objects with a "$h->tag" value of "~comme +nt", and the content of the comment is stored in the "text" attribut +e ("$h->attr ("text")"). For example, parsing this code with HTML::TreeBuilder... <!-- I like Pie. Pie is good --> produces an HTML::Element object with these attributes: "_tag", "~comment", "text", " I like Pie.\n Pie is good\n "` [download] Which applied as `#!/usr/bin/perl use 5.18.2; use warnings; use HTML::TreeBuilder; my $root = HTML::TreeBuilder->new_from_file (\*DATA); $root->look_down (_tag => "div", id => "footer") ->replace_with (HTML::Element->new ("~comment", text => " foobar " +)); say $root->as_HTML (undef, " ", {}); __DATA__ <div id="quiteok">ok</div> <div id="footer"> bad <div> stuff <div> and lots of it </div> </div> </div> <div> something good </div>` [download] Results in `<html> <head> </head> <body> <div id="quiteok">ok</div> <!-- foobar --> <div> something good </div> </body> </html>` [download] Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: Find and replace specific elements with HTML::TreeBuilder by mldvx4 (Hermit) on May 08, 2016 at 15:00 UTC
Thanks. HTML::Elements was what I needed to look at.	[reply]