Earlier in the evening, converter, who was working on his extremely handy perldoc IRC bot, had an idea: that it would be pretty handy for the bot to have a searchable list of all cpan modules with their descriptions. Well, CPAN, doesn't exactly have a list of modules, it has a catagorized list of modules, known as theModule Long List. There is also a text-only (but much harder to parse) version. With the wonderousHTML::TokeParser, a script was quickly written that extracts the module links and their corresponding descriptions. Note that this script may seem slow; it is because CPAN isn't the fastest of servers. Just be patient :) 

#!perl -w

use HTML::TokeParser;
use LWP::Simple;
use strict;

## set marker definintions
my $content = get("http://www.cpan.org/modules/00modlist.long.html");

my $parse = HTML::TokeParser->new(\$content);

my @module;
my @links;
while (my $token = $parse->get_tag("a"))
{
        my $url = $token->[1]{href} || "";     
        my $text = $parse->get_trimmed_text("/a");
        if (($url =~ /module=/i) && $text)
        {
                push @links, quotemeta(qq(<a href="$url">$text</a>));
                my $header = quotemeta(qq(http://search.cpan.org/searc
+h?module=));
                $url =~ s/^$header(.*?)/$1/i;
                push @module, $url;
        }
}
my @descs;
foreach my $link (@links)
{
        my ($desc) = $content =~ /$link(.*?)\Q<\E/im;
        push @descs, $desc;
}

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In reply to Grab a list of all modules on CPAN + their descriptions by jryan

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