I'm using  HTML::TreeBuilder to extract data from an HTML table. The obvious solution would be to use  HTML::TableExtract which would work if my data was organized nicely.
My data fits entirely in one cell, with titles in  span tags as follows:

<span> Author_name </span>
__filler__
<ul>
  <li> book 1 by Author_name </li>
  <li> book 2 by Author_name </li>
<ul>

<span> New_Author </span>
__filler__
<ul>.....
[download]

By using the look_down method, I was able to create a list of authors, and a list of books. What I have not been able to do, is assign a book to a given author, in order to sort for example by number of published books.

I thought of doing something as follows:

 my %publications = $tree->look_down( _tag => 'span');

 open my $fh , "<", $tree->as_HTML;
 while (<$fh>)
 {
  my $author;
  next unless ($_ =~ /(?:span|li)/;
  $_ =~ /span/ ? $author =~ /\>(.+)\<\/span/ : push @publications{$aut
+hor}, /li\>(.+)\<\/li/;
 }
[download]

Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree? Thank you for the input!

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