in reply to Extract hidden values from HTML

What do you mean by hidden values?

A value either appears in the HTML, or not. Maybe the browser hides it with CSS, but a HTML parser is fairly unimpressed by such styling information.

So I don't see how values in HTML can be "hidden".

If you have a specific problem, please post your code, example input and a description of what is not working.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: Extract hidden values from HTML
by Corion (Patriarch) on Dec 14, 2009 at 08:12 UTC

    Maybe kalyanrajsista means that the "hidden value" is inserted as a HTML comment and thus not visible to the user. But it's hard to tell without seeing some of the relevant HTML.

[reply]
Re^2: Extract hidden values from HTML
by kalyanrajsista (Scribe) on Dec 15, 2009 at 11:12 UTC 
    <html><head>
<title>Data</title>
</head>
<form name="action">
<table cellspacing="1" cellpadding="1">
<tr>
    <td>File name</td>
    <td>From To</td>
    <td>Svc</td>
    <td>Period</td>
    <td>Seq#</td>
    <td>Reason for Rejection</td>
    <td>Next Action</td>
</tr>
<tr>
    <td>Sample.XML</td>
    <td><a href='dch_redirect?refer=10293377&ref=10293377'>USA-IND</a>
+</td>
    <td>Voice</td>
    <td><input type="hidden" name="recid1" value="10293377">2009/08</t
+d>
    <td>03386</td>
    <td>data already exists</td>
    <td><input type="checkbox" name="c_1"></td>
</tr>
</body></html>

    [download]

    Above is the sample HTML file and I want to extract the hidden value's with the names recid1. Or is there any way to get 'href' values from the HTML content.

[reply]
[d/l]
      One way 
      #!/usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;

use HTML::TreeBuilder;

my $t = HTML::TreeBuilder->new_from_file(*DATA);

my @hidden_inputs = $t->look_down(
  _tag => q{input},
  type => q{hidden},
  name => q{recid1},
);
  
for my $hidden_input (@hidden_inputs){
  printf qq{*%s*\n}, $hidden_input->attr(q{value});
}

__DATA__
<html><head>
<title>Data</title>
</head>
<form name="action">
<table cellspacing="1" cellpadding="1">
<tr>
  <td>File name</td>
  <td>From To</td>
  <td>Svc</td>
  <td>Period</td>
  <td>Seq#</td>
  <td>Reason for Rejection</td>
  <td>Next Action</td>
</tr>
<tr>
  <td>Sample.XML</td>
  <td><a href='dch_redirect?refer=10293377&ref=10293377'>USA-IND</a></
+td>
  <td>Voice</td>
  <td><input type="hidden" name="recid1" value="10293377">2009/08</td>
  <td>03386</td>
  <td>data already exists</td>
  <td><input type="checkbox" name="c_1"></td>
</tr>
</body></html>

      [download]
      *10293377*

      [download]
      update: Similar would also work for hrefs
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]

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