The "table states" are used to deal with situations where you have tables within cells of other tables within cells of other tables (...etc.) The primary aim of the module is to "extract" data from heavily formatted web pages, not tables used to store plain data. Yeah, it's overkill if you want to suck data out a data table with no embedded subtables, but that's why there's shortcut methods.
It's actually a pretty useful module for anyone who's tried to zero in on some piece of data on a webpage and have pulled their hair out trying to get a home-rolled regex-based or HTML::Parser solution to work.
It's quite a spiffy module. Lets you get on and worry about other things than deciphering a page full of td tags. :-)
Gary Blackburn
Trained Killer
Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
Please read these before you post! —
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
- a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
| |
For: |
|
Use: |
| & | | & |
| < | | < |
| > | | > |
| [ | | [ |
| ] | | ] |
Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.