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

Hello Esteemed Monks of Perl,

I have a problem that I have been working on for a couple of days. I'm a new comer to Perl, so I may be missing something obvious, but my searching through the web and documentation has not produced a definitive answer on this.

My problem is I have some string of text ($text) that I know is somewhere in a page of HTML. What I would like to do is search though the HTML for $text and find out what the lowest level element is that contains $text, and be able to find out the ancestors for that element.

I feel like I am in the right arena with HTML::TreeBuilder and HTML::TokeParser, since TreeBuilder maintains the relationships I am looking for while TokeParser make it easy to search for text, but I feel like I need some combination of the two. I also feel like I might be overlooking something obvious in one or the other (I guess I have a lot of feelings.)

  • Comment on Finding the DOM element via text search

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Finding the DOM element via text search
by jrsimmon (Hermit) on Jul 02, 2009 at 14:47 UTC
[reply]
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Re: Finding the DOM element via text search
by Anonymous Monk on Jul 02, 2009 at 14:45 UTC
[reply]
Re: Finding the DOM element via text search
by wfsp (Abbot) on Jul 03, 2009 at 10:36 UTC
    Here's my go. It recursively builds a list of "ancestors" for each node using $h->lineage. The $h->objectify_text allows text nodes to have ancestors too. When it finds any matching text it prints out the list. 
    #!/usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;

use HTML::TreeBuilder;

my $h = HTML::TreeBuilder->new_from_content(
  do{local $/;<DATA>},
);
$h->objectify_text;

my $text = q{text};
walk($h, $text);

sub walk{
  my $h = shift;
  my $text = shift;
  for my $ele ($h->content_list) {
    my @lineage = $ele->lineage;
    my @ancestors;
    for my $ancestor (reverse @lineage){
      push @ancestors, $ancestor->tag;
    }
    if (
      $ele->tag eq q{~text}
        and
      $ele->attr(q{text})
        and
      $ele->attr(q{text}) eq $text
    )
    {

      printf(
        qq{%s\t}, 
        $_
      ) for @ancestors;

      printf(
        qq{found *%s* at depth %s\n}, 
        $ele->attr(q{text}), 
        scalar @ancestors
      );

    }
    walk($ele, $text);
  }
}

__DATA__
<html><head><title>search</title></head>
<body>
<p>text</p>
<div>
<p>text</p>
</div>
</body></html>

    [download]
    html    body    p    found *text* at depth 3
html    body    div    p    found *text* at depth 4

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