Thanks for the info, Your Mother

I've been testing XML::LibXML with various HTML files (our corpus has various sizes) to get some benchmarks, and I must say, it's surprisingly quick (except for really large files, which isn't really relevant in my case), however:

• this is a deal-killer: the HTML must be balanced with nice </x> closing tags (which it's often not in the real world), else it croaks without producing any output (HTML::Parser tolerates this kind of thing).

HTML::Parser soldiers on despite missing tags, etc, and still produces useful output (required in our app).

Some (unscientific) benchmarks:

104KB HTML file processed 100 times (average of 3 runs)
HTML::Parser: ~20s
XML::LibXML: ~13s

371KB HTML file processed 100 times
HTML::Parser: ~51s
XML::LibXML: ~30s

550KB HTML file processed 100 times
HTML::Parser: ~73s
XML::LibXML: ~49s

4.3MB HTML file processed once (silly, but interesting in a huh? kind of way)
HTML::Parser: ~4s
XML::LibXML: ~85s

Conclusion: it looks like XML::LibXML is the way to go. My only concern (the reason preventing me from switching over to XML::LibXML) is how to get it to be tolerant of lazy/broken HTML the way HTML::Parser is.

I've had a gander at XML::LibXML but cannot see how to code it to be real-world HTML tolerant (so I can test how tolerant it is).

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