Weird syntax error message

lampros21_7 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi, i have written some code to act like a web crawler but during compilation it gives me a syntax error message. I can't find anything wrong with it so am posting it here:

use WWW::Mechanize;
 use HTML::TreeBuilder;
 
 
 
 print "Please input the URL of the site to be searched \n";
  
 my $url_name = <STDIN>; # The user inputs the URL to be searched
 
 #Create an instance of the webcrawler
 our $webcrawler = WWW::Mechanize->new();
                           
 
 our $webcrawler = get($url_name);
 
 our @website_links = $webcrawler->links($url_name);  
 
 # The HTML is stripped off the contents and the text is stored in an 
+array of  strings
 our $x = 0;
 our $stripped_html[$x] = $webcrawler( format => "text" );
 $x = $x + 1;
  
 
 my @visited_urls = ($url_name);
    
 # While the array still has elements(URL's) check the content for lin
+ks and strip the HTML
 while (@website_links) { 
    
    if ((grep {$_ eq $website_links[0] } @visited_urls) > 0) { # If th
+e URL has been visited don't visit again
        shift @website_links;
[download]

It doesn't like the $stripped_html[$x] bit on the 13th line and gives me a syntax error on that. I thought i could use an x variable as a number. What i want to do is then go on a loop and the array will get bigger because my x will increment by 1 every time the loop is done. Any ideas?Thanks

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Re: Weird syntax error message by sk (Curate) on Jul 30, 2005 at 00:48 UTC
`stripped_html` does not exist. You cannot just declare just one element of an array. Try `our @stripped_html;` and then do `$stripped_html[$x] = blah;` BTW why `our`? I would use `my` -SK	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Weird syntax error message by mifflin (Curate) on Jul 30, 2005 at 00:44 UTC
You can't create an our (or my) instance of an array element. I think you meant... `our @stripped_html; $stripped_html[$x] = $webcrawler( format => "text" );` [download] untested	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Weird syntax error message by holli (Abbot) on Jul 30, 2005 at 09:11 UTC
Two notes: Instead of using @visited_urls you might be better of using %visited_urls, so you can avoid constructs as `my @visited_urls = ($url_name); ... while (@website_links) { if ((grep {$_ eq $website_links[0] } @visited_urls) > 0)` [download] and use this instead: `my %visited_urls = ($url_name => 1); ... while (@website_links) { if ( $visited_urls{$website_links[0]} )` [download] Also, as we don't see the rest of your code, ensure you have a `sleep` command in your main loop to avoid hammering the webserver. holli, /regexed monk/	[reply] [d/l] [select]