comment on

Thanks for the previous.

I have a question about either HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath or HTML::Element, and the interaction between them. I would like to manipulate the content of an element while leaving all its children in place. I'm not able to find a way around that because it appears that replace_with() also automatically and unavoidably escapes the < and > signs. The example below uses ~literal but I've also tried creating a new element. Either way, the child elements within the selected element get escaped despite my best efforts. How would it be possible to do something like the following (using a different work flow if necessary) such that the tags for the child elements remain intact and unescaped?

#!/usr/bin/perl

use HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath;
use HTML::Element;
use warnings;
use strict;

my $xhtml = HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath->new;
$xhtml->implicit_tags(1);
$xhtml->no_space_compacting(1);

$xhtml->parse_file(\*DATA)
        or die("Could not parse file handle for 'DATA' : $!\n");

for my $item ($xhtml->findnodes('//div/ul/li')) {
    my $li = $item->as_XML;

    $li =~ s/^\s+//;
    # ... omitting rest of the stuff which happens to $li ...
    
    my $new = HTML::Element->new('~literal', 'text' => $li);
    $item->replace_with($new);
}

print $xhtml->as_XML_indented;
$xhtml->delete;

exit(0);

__DATA__

<html>
 <head>
  <title>Foo Bar</title>
 </head>
 <body>

  <div><a href=" http://foo.example.com/ ">Foo Bar</a>
   <ul>
    <li> foo foo foo
 foo <em>bar</em> foo
foo foo foo foo
</li></ul></div>

  <div><a href=" http://bar.example.com/ ">Bar Foo</a>
   <ul>
    <li> foo foo foo
 foo <em>bar</em> foo
foo foo foo foo
     <ul>
      <li>alpha</li>
      <li>b<em>et</em>a</li>
      <li>gamma</li>
     </ul>
    </li></ul></div>

 </body>
</html>
[download]

The output I get is as follows:

<html>
  <head>
    <title>Foo Bar</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div><a href=" http://foo.example.com/ ">Foo Bar</a>
      <ul>&lt;li&gt; foo foo foo
 foo &lt;em&gt;bar&lt;/em&gt; foo
foo foo foo foo
&lt;/li&gt;

      </ul>
    </div>
    <div><a href=" http://bar.example.com/ ">Bar Foo</a>
      <ul>&lt;li&gt; foo foo foo
 foo &lt;em&gt;bar&lt;/em&gt; foo
foo foo foo foo
     &lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;alpha&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;b&lt;em&gt;et&lt;/e
+m&gt;a&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;gamma&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;

      </ul>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>
[download]

The output I would like to get instead would look like this:

<html>
  <head>
    <title>Foo Bar</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div><a href=" http://foo.example.com/ ">Foo Bar</a>
      <ul><li>foo foo foo
 foo <em>bar</em> foo
foo foo foo foo
</li>

      </ul>HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath
    </div>
    <div><a href=" http://bar.example.com/ ">Bar Foo</a>
      <ul><li>foo foo foo
 foo <em>bar</em> foo
foo foo foo foo
     <ul><li>alpha</li><li>b<em>et</em>a</li><li>gamma</li></ul></li>

      </ul>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>
[download]

I'm not sure if HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath can be made to work like that. If it can, what has to change?

In reply to Avoiding escaped child elements with HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath or HTML::Element by mldvx4

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