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

I want to get rid of white space between the <h1> and <h2> tags, and am trying to use HTML::Element->splice_content to do it. I guess I'm doing it wrong. Can someone tell me why? 
use strict;
use warnings;
use HTML::TreeBuilder;

my $html = '<h1>Blah</h1>
&nbsp;<p>&nbsp;<br>
<h2>Blah</h2>';

my $element_root = HTML::TreeBuilder->new_from_content($html);
$element_root->dump;
print "\n";
$element_root->splice_content(1,1);
$element_root->dump;

[download]
Outputs: 
<html> @0 (IMPLICIT)
  <head> @0.0 (IMPLICIT)
  <body> @0.1 (IMPLICIT)
    <h1> @0.1.0
      "Blah"
    " á"
    <p> @0.1.2
      "á"
      <br> @0.1.2.1
    <h2> @0.1.3
      "Blah"

<html> @0 (IMPLICIT)
  <head> @0.0 (IMPLICIT)

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UPDATE: Thanks to everyone below. Practically every suggestion was useful. In the end, I realized that the main mistake I was making was doing the splice from the root node, rather than the body. I'm still not 100% satisfied, but at least now the splice works. The code I'm using now is: 
use strict;
use warnings;
use HTML::Treebuilder;

my $html = '<h1>Blah</h1>
&nbsp;<p>&nbsp;<br>
<h2>Blah</h2>';

my $element_root = HTML::TreeBuilder->new_from_content($html);
my $body = $element_root->look_down( _tag => "body");
$body->dump;
print "\n";
$body->splice_content(1,2);
$body->dump;

[download]

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Help with HTML::Element->splice_content
by gu (Beadle) on Dec 02, 2005 at 19:00 UTC
[reply]
Re: Help with HTML::Element->splice_content
by santonegro (Scribe) on Dec 02, 2005 at 21:16 UTC
    First, let's get clear on what you mean: do you want to get rid of white space or the non-breaking space entities?

    Regardless of which it is, the HTML::TreeBuilder objectify_text method will probably be of use.

[reply]
[d/l]
Re: Help with HTML::Element->splice_content
by santonegro (Scribe) on Dec 02, 2005 at 23:36 UTC
    Ok, I have written a program that you can customize. Just set $targetto what you want to wipe out of text segments... for some reason the &nbsp; is not matching when I switch $target to it and I dont know why.

    But as you can see, the "hi" was removed... I will ask on the libwww-perl list about this. 

    use strict;
use warnings;
use HTML::TreeBuilder;

my $html = '<h1>Blah</h1>&nbsp;hithere&nbsp;<p>&nbsp;<br>
<h2>Blah</h2>';

my $element_root = HTML::TreeBuilder->new_from_content($html);

$element_root->objectify_text;

$element_root->dump;
print "\n";

my $target;
$target = '&nbsp;';
$target = 'hi';

my @text = $element_root->look_down('_tag' => '~text');
for my $text_node (@text) {
  my $tmp = $text_node->attr('text');
  warn $tmp;
  if ($tmp =~ m!$target!) {
    warn 'here';
    $tmp =~ s!$target!!g;
    $text_node->attr(text => $tmp);
  }
}

print "\n";
$element_root->dump;

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[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
Re: Help with HTML::Element->splice_content
by santonegro (Scribe) on Dec 02, 2005 at 21:32 UTC
    Another thing: you can't be using TreeBuilder - you spelled the "b" with lowercase and it should be uppercase.

    At any rate, just break the tree into elements, and traverse or map through them and then ->detach() the ones that you want gone... example to follow.

[reply]
[d/l]
      Lower case b works on windows but not on linux. In any case, thanks for pointing that out, because it needs to work on both.
[reply]

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