I asked a very similar question yesterday. I was having trouble with the fact that the web page is written such that it only makes sense after a javascript engine has parsed it. I was told that LWP was giving me the same answer as File->SaveAs on the browser (not true). After that, I started looking into the JavaScript.pm package thinking I could perhaps run the source of the page through a javascript engine myself. I stopped there. It looked very daunting. Plus, in the end, I found a different way of solving the problem....

Where cleverness fails, use brute force.

However, as far as the page sometimes failing with no apparent reason....
I have had that happen. I have not been able to debug it, but it appears that when I hit a url thousands of times, it will occasionally puke. It doesn't seem to die permanently though. I put in a "fail this many times" clause and fixed my problem... (brute force over cleverness)

Stony

In reply to Re: Scraping a website - various problems by stony
in thread Scraping a website - various problems by Cody Pendant

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • 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:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.