I'd like to process an XHTML document and remove certain types of nodes if they are blank. I've started trying to do that with HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath and seem to find the I want to remove. The following subroutine finds them just fine but appears to fail to delete the found empty nodes: 

sub readthefile {
    my ($file)= (@_);
    print qq(File=$file\n);

    my $xhtml = HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath->new;
    $xhtml->implicit_tags(1);
    $xhtml->parse_file($file)
        or die("Could not parse '$file' : $!\n");

    for my $list ($xhtml->findnodes('/html/body//div/ul/li')) {
        if($list->is_empty) {
            print qq(DELETE\n);
            $list->delete(); # this line does not do what I thought it
+ would :(
        }

    }

    print $xhtml->as_XML_indented;
    $xhtml->delete;
    return (1);
}

[download]

As it is, the routine just prints out "DELETE" the right number of times but then at the end still prints the unmodified original XHTML. How do I excise the chosen nodes from the final output if they are empty?

In reply to Deleting nodes with HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath by mldvx4

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