I'm scraping a HTML table of Cruise Ships and their locations, etc., using HTML::TableExtract and I wanted to use a "less brittle" approach. I know the desired column names in the table, but trying to extract based on that is yielding zero results. I can get the table by defining the border but I didn't really want that. 

# get the data from the web.  Typically this is:
# http://www.sailwx.info/shiptrack/cruiseships.phtml
# Either pass this in as --url <page_url> when invoking or just set it
+.

$cols = 'Ship,last reported (UTC),position,Callsign';
$url = "http://www.sailwx.info/shiptrack/cruiseships.phtml";

my $input;

my $out_fn = 'C:\\Program Files\\cron\\Cruise Ships\\ship_data.csv';
open(my $out_fh, '>', $out_fn)
   or die("Unable to create output file \"$out_fn\": $!\n");

my $m = WWW::Mechanize->new();
   $m->get($url);
   $input = $m->content;

my $te;
if ( defined ($cols)) 
{
  my @headers = split(/,/, $cols);

te = HTML::TableExtract->new( attribs => { border => 1 } );
} 
  else 
   {
    $te = new HTML::TableExtract( depth => $depth, count=>$count); 
   }
$te->parse($input);

[download]
Neither of the following two extraction approaches seemed to work on the HTML. I had to find the table by border (as you can see in above code). This results in something more fragile than I would like.

I thought at least one of these two lines would work but they don't: 

$te = new HTML::TableExtract ( headers => [qw(Ship position)] );

$te = new HTML::TableExtract(headers=>\@headers);

[download]

I even tried this line... 

$te = HTML::TableExtract->new( headers => \@headers);

[download]
... but it doesn't work either. Well, I didn't really think it was a problem with spaces. I don't know what the problem is.

In reply to Extracted HTML table by mcoblentz

Title:
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