does anybody know if any LWP or similar implement DOM
LWP::UserAgent does not provide DOM-level access.

WWW::Mechanize doesn't either, but does parse the HTML for you in order to provide methods like links(), which incidentally, does what you want.

I have a hunch that DOM parsing is cleaner than X(HT)ML parsing
"DOM" is not a manner of parsing, but a manner of access. For methods from the DOM to be able to access data from a tree of nodes, some "parser" code still has to build that tree.

It's certainly cleaner to access data using DOM (or DOM-like) methods, or selector interfaces like XPath or XQuery.

HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath builds an HTML::Tree internally and then provides XPath-like access to that tree.

(HTML parsing) sometimes not being well formed etc
If you're talking about the robustness of parsing HTML, there are many libraries that parse HTML properly even when given invalid input. It's quite orthogonal to how you access the data once you've parsed the document.

-David

In reply to Re^2: Regex to match first html tag previous to text by erroneousBollock
in thread Regex to match first html tag previous to text by Greebo

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.