html::parser question

treebeard has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

My question is with HTML::Parser but I also wonder if I am approaching this issue the correct way. I am trying to parse through a web-page and pull out the information I want which I would like to write into a text file or into memory. Here is a sample of some of the web page:

    tr
  </tr><tr>
    <td><font size="2" face="Arial,Helvetica">
    <hr size="2" width="100%">
    Title: <b>2004-10-15 Off Season Rosters</b><BR>
    Post by <b>sydvicious</b> on <b>Oct 15<sup>th</sup>, 2004, 7:24pm<
+/b>
    <hr width="100%" size="1">
    I know, the keeper years all say &quot;1&quot;.<br><br><pre><br>TR
+ANSACTIONS:<br><br>Scott - Activated Catalanotto_Frank/TOR; Waived Ca
+stilla_Vinny/COL<br>Scott - Activated Day_Zach/MON; Waived Reese_Poke
+y/BOS<br>Scott - Activated Hernandez_Runelvys/KCA; Waived Lowe_Derek/
+BOS<br>Scott - Activated VanBenschoten_John/PIT; Waived Quantrill_Pau
+l/NYA<br>Scott - Activated Williamson_Scott/BOS; Waived Reyes_Dennys/
+KCA<br>Sean - Activated Burnett_Sean/P
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Obviously, this is a parial HTML listing from the web page. I am trying to pull the names in the HTML so I can do some other things to them. Using the following perl, I am able to use HTML::parser and my vague understanding of it to print out what I would like. My questions are: 1) can I have the print statement in the subroutine "text" directed into a file or into an array for use outside of the package? 2) is there another way that I can approach this problem that I am completely missing other than HTML::Parser?

#!d:/perl56/bin

use strict;

{
package HTMLParser;
use base "HTML::Parser";

sub text
    {
        my ($self, $origtext) = @_;
        $origtext =~ s/&nbsp;//g;
        $self->{TEXT} .= $origtext;

        ### Read through hash and test each line against array
        @field = qw (C 1B 2B 3B SS OF1 OF2 OF3 DH B1 B2 B3 B4 B5 B6 B7
+ B8 SP1 SP2 SP3 SP4 SP5 SW1 SW2 SW3 SW4 SW5 SW6 SW7 RP1 RP2 RP3 RP4 R
+P5 RP6 RP7 IR);

        my @test = split(/\s*[ ]/,$origtext);
        
        foreach $line (@field) {
            if ($test[0] eq $line) {
                print "$test[1]\n";        
            }
        }

    }
}

my $leaguefile = $ARGV[0];
open(DATAFILE1,"$leaguefile") || die "Cannot open test file";

my $sp = new HTMLParser;

while (<DATAFILE1>) {
    $sp->parse_file($_);    
}
$sp->eof;

close DATAFILE1;
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Re: html::parser question by jpeg (Chaplain) on Mar 04, 2005 at 16:36 UTC
My questions are: 1) can I have the print statement in the subroutine "text" directed into a file or into an array for use outside of the package? 2) is there another way that I can approach this problem that I am completely missing other than HTML::Parser? 1) Sure you can. If you'd like to unshift/push $test1 onto an array, define a global array and pass it to test() as a reference and and return the reference. Or create an array within test() and pass an array reference back. If you'd like to print into a file, that's certaily doable too. Open the output file, say `print FH "$test[1]\n";` and voila! 2)I'm not sure. If you have something with a lot of HTML and you want text, then you have to parse it with something. WWW::Mech has a good reputation. HTML::TokeParser's pretty nice too. It's kind of a drag that your sample data didn't contain anything that you're searcing for in @field. I assume you're searching for the three capital letters after the /, correct? Maybe you could just split the raw HTML on those.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: html::parser question by Popcorn Dave (Abbot) on Mar 04, 2005 at 16:54 UTC
Definitely take a look at HTML::TokeParser. Since you're parsing information in to tokens, you can easily pick out the bits that you want. Useless trivia: In the 2004 Las Vegas phone book there are approximately 28 pages of ads for massage, but almost 200 for lawyers.	[reply]