Every time I invoke HTML::TableExtract's parse() method, it doesn't re-initialise the object, it appends to the object. See example below.

I want to use it on a new table every time (iterating through a paged website with a scraper), and it doesn't make sense to keep the previous table.

My workaround is to just re-initialise the object with new(), but that feels wrong. I've read through the POD for TableExtract and and I'm baffled. There doesn't seem to be a preference for this behaviour and there doesn't seem to be a method to re-initialise the object either in TableExtract or HTML::Parser. 

use strict;
use warnings;
use diagnostics;
use HTML::TableExtract;
my $table_1 = '
<table><tr><td>foo</td><td>bar</td></tr>
<tr><td>baz</td><td>quux</td></tr></table>';
my $table_2 = '
<table><tr><td>bof</td><td>xyzzy</td></tr>
<tr><td>bat</td><td>gazonk</td></tr></table>';
my $te = HTML::TableExtract->new();
$te->parse($table_1);
foreach my $ts ($te->tables) {
   print "Table (", join(',', $ts->coords), "):\n";
   foreach my $row ($ts->rows) {
      print join(',', @$row), "\n";
   }
 }
## what goes here if I want to dump table_1 ?
$te->parse($table_2);
foreach my $ts ($te->tables) {
   print "Table (", join(',', $ts->coords), "):\n";
   foreach my $row ($ts->rows) {
      print join(',', @$row), "\n";
   }
 }

[download]

($_='kkvvttuu bbooppuuiiffss qqffssmm iibbddllffss')
=~y~b-v~a-z~s; print

In reply to How do I "reset" HTML::TableExtract? by Cody Pendant

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