Hi kevyt,

I've found (being fairly close to a beginner myself with parsing HTML), that it's best to attack such a problem in little pieces.  Use print/printf along the way to show what your data looks like at the moment (and use Data::Dumper to really inspect your data with a fine tooth comb).

I don't see in your program where you're trying to construct the HTML tree, so I took your program and extended it a bit.  Here's what I have:

# Strict
use strict;
use warnings;

# Libraries
use Data::Dumper;
use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTML::TreeBuilder;

my $url = 'http://www.somepage.com';
# $browser->cookie_jar({});   #### use if the site requires cookies

my $browser = LWP::UserAgent->new;

my @ns_headers = (
  'User-Agent' => 'Mozilla/4.76 [en] (Win98; U)',
  'Accept' => 'image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg,
      image/pjpeg, image/png, */*',
  'Accept-Charset' => 'iso-8859-1,*,utf-8',
  'Accept-Language' => 'en-US',
);

my $response = $browser->get($url, @ns_headers);
die "Can't get $url -- ", $response->status_line unless $response->is_
+success;

die "Hey, I was expecting HTML, not ", $response->content_type
  unless $response->content_type eq 'text/html';

# Now get the content, and display it
my $content = $response->content;
print "TFD> content $content\n";

# Now build the HTML tree
my $tree = HTML::TreeBuilder->new_from_content($content);

# Now find each occurrence of the desired tag
my $tag = 'a';
my $match = $tree->find($tag);
if ($match) {
    # Found it!
    print "Found tag '$tag' ...\n";
    print "   As text:  ", $match->as_text, "\n";
    print "   As text:  ", $match->as_HTML, "\n";
} else {
     print "Unable to find tag '$tag'\n";
}
[download]

Note that I'm building an HTML tree from the $content which is returned after a successful get from the LWP::UserAgent opbject.

The program then prints out the contents in the line:

print "TFD> content $content\n";
[download]

as a debugging step (you can remove that once you're sure you're getting what you expect back from the LWP fetch).

Then you construct the HTML tree with:

my $tree = HTML::TreeBuilder->new_from_content($content);
[download]

Finally, you use find to locate an occurrence of the desired tag.  In the program above, I searched for the first occurrence of an anchor 'a' with:

my $tag = 'a';
my $match = $tree->find($tag);
[download]

which is then rendered both as text and HTML with:

    print "   As text:  ", $match->as_text, "\n";
    print "   As text:  ", $match->as_HTML, "\n"
[download]

Does that help you get further along?

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