use LWP::Simple;
my $page = get("http://www.google.de");

if ( ( my $position = index $page, "font-family" ) >= 0 ) {
    print "Found at $position.\n";
}
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</title><style><!--body,td,a,p,.h{font-family:arial,sans-serif;}
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Be sure to do as is described in the POD for LWP::Simple: Check your return values for success.

my $page = get("http://www.whoever.de");
die "Couldn't get the page!\n" unless defined $page;
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It could be that you're not even succeeding in fetching the page. Next, dump $page into a text file where you can examine it later to see if it really contains the text you're looking for (without any line-breaks, etc). If your HTML parsing needs get fairly elaborate, you might want to look at HTML::TokeParser anyway; use a powertool when a powertool is needed.




Dave

Thanks for your help Dave. TokeParser was a great Idea. It took a while but I got it working now. Thx.

davido has given you good advice. I would go further and say _don't_ parse HTML even in apparently straightforward cases.

There is often (always?) shed loads of arbitray white space which can easily defeat a regex. The HTML can be 'loose', 'strict' and change every day!

Once you've used HTML::TokeParser (if I can, anybody can!) you'll be able to reuse the code in any future apps.

Have a look at this tutorial. There is an example here. Search and Supersearch will find many more.

It does seem like a lot of trouble if you are in a hurry! But I assure you the effort will pay dividends.

Best of luck, wfsp

Thanks. I did just that (I used tokeparser). It took a while but its worth it. Thx.

I wish you had just gone ahead and asked the whole question at once as we requested. Breaking a single question into pieces and only feeding us one piece at a time might seem to be a good approach to you, but trust me, we can take bigger bites. We don't want to write your script for you, but if we're going to answer a question, at least let us answer the complete question.

You really should be using HTML::TokeParser. Nevertheless, the following will use a fragile regexp to find a keyword, and grab the digits that immediately follow it (whitespace optional).

if( $page =~ m/keyword\s+(\d+)/ ) {
   print "Found the keyword, and retrieved a value of $1\n";
}
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Now if your HTML has multiple instances of this keyword, you'll have to ask us another question, or read perlretut and perlrequick.

By the way, if you're screen-scraping Google you are violating their Terms of Service, and exposing yourself to civil liability. From the Google Terms of Service page:

No Automated Querying
You may not send automated queries of any sort to Google's system without express permission in advance from Google. Note that "sending automated queries" includes, among other things:

• using any software which sends queries to Google to determine how a website or webpage "ranks" on Google for various queries;
• "meta-searching" Google; and
• performing "offline" searches on Google.

Please do not write to Google to request permission to "meta-search" Google for a research project, as such requests will not be granted.




Dave

Unless I'm mistaken, it appears that what you're trying to do can be solved with a fairly simple regular expression. Unless you actually need the index, try:

if($page =~ m/\bword\b\s+.{4}(\d{5})/)
{
    print "The number is $1";
}
else
{
    print "No match";
}
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From left-to-right, the expression states:

\bword\b - Find the text 'word'
\s+ - Followed by one or more whitespace characters
.{4} - Followed by any four characters
(\d{5}) - Followed by five digits

The parenthesis around the '\d{5}' instruct perl to store this match in the variable $1 (for the purposes of this discussion). So the matched digits are stored in $1.