I just whipped up a quick bit of code to scrape the TVGuide listings for a given zipcode and subscriber type (Cable, Sattelite, Antenna), and dump them to the screen (for now). I'm trying to figure out a better way to format these, visually, so that at some point, they end up as HTML, in a display that is NOT using HTML tables to display them (no CSS allowed either).

Here's the working code I have so far, try it out. 

use strict; 
use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Cookies;
use HTML::TableExtract;

# Define your service preference here
# Cable                 = 1
# Sattelite Dish        = 2
# Broadcast/Antenna     = 3

my $service     = '1';
my $zip         = '02891'; 
$service = $service == 1 ? 'Cable' 
         : $service == 2 ? 'Satellite' : 'Broadcast';

my $cookiefile  = 'tvguide.cookies';

my $ua          = 'Mozilla/4.0 (Windows NT 5.0)';   
my $browser     = LWP::UserAgent->new(
                        agent           => "$ua",
                        env_proxy       => 1, 
                        timeout         => 30,
);  

$browser->cookie_jar(HTTP::Cookies->new(
                        'file'           => $cookiefile,
                        'ignore_discard' => 1,   
                        'autosave'       => 1,));

my $url         = 'http://tvguide.com/listings/setup/';
$url           .= "Localize${service}.asp";
$url           .= "?I=&ZipCode=${zip}&url=";

print "Fetching $service listings for zipcode $zip\n";
my $response    = $browser->get($url);
my $content     = $response->content;

my $te = new HTML::TableExtract(depth => 3, 
                                count => 4);
$te->parse($content);

foreach my $table ($te->tables) {
        foreach my $row ($te->rows($table)) {
                print join(',', @$row), "\n";
        }
}

[download]

The end goal should return a nice easy-to-read set of listings, not using HTML tables, so they can be displayed on a Palm device. It's more of a proof-of-concept for now, but I'm looking for some ideas on how I might be able to format this better.

Perhaps keeping the date/time rows above each listing itself?

Some other ideas? Some other module I might leverage? Thanks everyone.

In reply to Formatting parsed TV Guide HTML listings by hacker

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
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