I've been struggling with HTML::LinkExtor for a while now, thanks to everyone who pointed me in its direction.

You can see the full documentation at http://search.cpan.org/author/GAAS/HTML-Parser-3.26/lib/HTML/LinkExtor.pm if you want to, but I'm just wondering what prompted the author to return the results as an array with a hash as the second item?

Here's the relevant section: 

$p->links 
Returns a list of all links found in the document. The
returned values will be anonymous arrays with the 
follwing [sic] elements: 
  [$tag, $attr => $url1, $attr2 => $url2,...]

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It's kind of confusing me. For a start, if it's a hash, shouldn't that be 

[$tag, {$attr => $url1, $attr2 => $url2,...}]

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instead?

And more to the point, I'm racking my not-inconsiderable knowledge of HTML to try and find a situation where a single tag could have two or more attributes which were links.

Apart from anything else, this structure leads to scary dereferencing being needed like this: 

$p = HTML::LinkExtor->new(\&cb, "http://www.perl.org/");
 sub cb {
     my($tag, %links) = @_;
     print "$tag @{[%links]}\n";
 }

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Maybe 

@{[%links]}

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isn't scary to you but it is to me...
-- 
($_='jjjuuusssttt annootthheer
     pppeeerrrlll haaaccckkeer')=~y/a-z//s;print;

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In reply to Why Would HTML::LinkExtor return a hash of attributes? by Cody Pendant

Title:
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