I'm working on HTML::TokeParser::Simple, version 3.0. Changes:

  1. Deprecate the return_* methods. $token->return_attr($foo); becomes $token->get_attr($foo) or $token->attr($foo).
  2. Have an optional (or automatic?) HTML entity encoding/decoding.
  3. Internals cleanup.
  4. Possibly allow auto-fetching from urls.

Item 1 is because return_foo is a horrible method name and I, the author, keep forgetting it. Still, this module is popular enough that I worry quite a bit about changing the API, even though I don't plan on removing deprecated methods for a long time.

However, the one thing tha keeps bugging me is my desire to solve vegasjoe's problem. This is probably the most common question that I field. If you have an HTML document in a file, it's easy to parse:

my $parser = HTML::TokeParser::Simple->new($file);

Of course, that's because I just inherit from HTML::TokeParser and don't worry about what's behind the scenes. However, what I really want to do is make this work:

my $parser = HTML::TokeParser::Simple->new($html_in_a_string);

Currently, people seem to get really confused because it's not intuitive to take a reference to a scalar to parse in-memory HTML. I'll probably do something like:

sub new_from_scalar {
    my ($class, $scalar) = @_;
    return $class->new(\$scalar);
}

[download]

Ultimately, I think we'll have the following constructors:

my $parser1 = HTML::TokePaser::Simple->new($file); works
my $parser2 = HTML::TokePaser::Simple->new($file_handle);
my $parser3 = HTML::TokePaser::Simple->new_from_scalar($string); 
my $parser4 = HTML::TokePaser::Simple->new_from_fqdn($fqdn);

[download]

Feedback and advice welcome.

Cheers,
Ovid

New address of my CGI Course.

In reply to HTML::TokeParser::Simple advice requested by Ovid

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