In the event of this random column changing you definitely need HTML::TreeBuilder. Straight-up string parsing will result in disaster - HTML::TreeBuilder, well, makes a proper tree structure out of the resulting HTML. Just pass in the content with $mech->content, have it parse, and follow the methods in HTML::Element. The one you want for tree traversal is look_down. The generalized way to go down the nodes is:

my @table = $root->look_down( _tag => 'table', .... ); # <== insert ad
+ditional attributes to specify the proper table
while ( @table ) {
  my $node = shift @table;
  if ( ref $node ) {
     .... # possibly do stuff depending on $node->tag and $node->attr(
+...)
     unshift @table, $node->content_list;
  }
  else {
     .... # here we have the leaf, or plain text
  }
}

[download]

Hope this helps.

In reply to Re: www::mechanize to scrape randomly ordered data? by whakka
in thread www::mechanize to scrape randomly ordered data? by punch_card_don

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