Monks, I need your all knowing perl wisdom. I am trying to figure out the look_down function. So far I haven't been able to find any good tutorials on the look_down function, but would like to learn more about it so I can easily pull information from tables out of text or html files.

Here is what I understand about the TreeBuilder Function, please correct me in any areas that I am wrong:

use HTML::TreeBuilder; This calls the "submodule" from the perl library for use in our code.

$myobject = HTML::TreeBuilder->new; Creates a new object for the treebuilder to build upon. This may sound dumb, can someone please explain what an "object" is? Also, what does this "->" tell the computer program to do?

$myobject->parse_file($my-file-to-pull-info-from); This fills the tree with the content based on html tags?

@a-new-array = $myobject->look_down(....); And this is the main area of confusion for me. I don't know how to tell the look_down function what to look for when searching tables, or how to locate specific information. An indepth look at the look_down function would be very helpful and greatly appreciated! Also, if I messed up any of the other items in my description of how to use HTML::TreeBuilder, please feel free to correct my mistakes.

Thanks for any help!


In reply to HTML::TreeBuilder - Look_Down Function by jdlev

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