Have you printed $mech->content? I assume that Firefox only supports CSS selectors for HTML. The page you gave is RSS (or ATOM or whatever other feed format). I assume that Firefox does not want to run CSS queries against RSS. Replacing your call to ->click with a simple call that returns the elements shows that no elements get found for either ->selector or ->xpath.

use WWW::Mechanize::Firefox;

my $firefox = WWW::Mechanize::Firefox -> new (
);

$firefox -> get("http://feeds.cbsnews.com/podcast_eveningnews_video_1?
+tag=contentMain%3bcontentBody");
print $firefox->ct;

print $_->{innerHTML} for $firefox->selector('a');

print $_->{innerHTML} for $firefox->xpath('//a');

[download]

I'm not sure what goes wrong here, but I assume that Firefox does not really support CSS or XPath queries for documents other than HTML documents. Even if it did, I highly doubt that the surrounding event model would support the ->click event as HTML pages do.

You can consider looking at Mojolicious, Web::Magic, Web::Scraper or App::scrape, all of whom do not munge the RSS through Firefox and all of whom support CSS and XPath queries - maybe you have more luck extracting the URLs with those.

In reply to Re^3: WWW::Mechanize::Firefox CSS Selectors by Corion
in thread WWW::Mechanize::Firefox CSS Selectors by Lobatto

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.