The problem with this:

$xml->findnodes('//html/head/title')

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... is that none of the names in the path include a namespace. (X)HTML elements are always namespaced. Hence my rather awkward...

$xml->findnodes('//*[local-name()="title"]')

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i.e. "select all elements where the local part of the element's name is 'title'"

Another solution (arguably a lot more readable) would be to forcibly bind the XHTML namespace to a prefix:

$xml->documentElement->setNamespace(
  'http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml' => 'xh',
);

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And then you can freely use that prefix in XPaths.

$xml->findnodes('//xh:html/xh:head/xh:title')

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This specific problem is mentioned in the XML::LibXML::Node documentation - look for the "NOTE ON NAMESPACES AND XPATH" in the documentation for the findnodes method.

perl -E'sub Monkey::do{say$_,for@_,do{($monkey=[caller(0)]->[3])=~s{::}{ }and$monkey}}"Monkey say"->Monkey::do'

In reply to Re^5: extracting data from HTML by tobyink
in thread extracting data from HTML by Jurassic Monk

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