Get all outbound links with WWW::Mechanize?

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

I'm using WWW::Mechanize and I'm trying to figure out how to get all the outbound links in a page. Getting all links within the same domain is easy enough:

use strict;
use Data::Dumper;
use WWW::Mechanize;

my $mech = new WWW::Mechanize;
$mech->get('http://example.com/');

my $hostname = quotemeta( $mech->uri()->host );

my @inbound_links = $mech->find_all_links(
    url_abs_regex => qr!^https?://$hostname/!
);

print Dumper(\@inbound_links);
[download]

However, I'm having a brain fart and cannot figure out how to do the inverse, getting all links NOT in the current domain?

Comment on Get all outbound links with WWW::Mechanize? Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Get all outbound links with WWW::Mechanize? by Corion (Patriarch) on Mar 23, 2011 at 15:43 UTC
The easy way is to just pull all links and apply your regular expression outside: `... my @outbound_links = grep { $_->url !~ qr!^https?://$hostname/! } $mec +h->find_all_links; ...` [download] The harder way is to make your regular expression look ahead and ensure that it doesn't match: `my @outbound_links = $mech->find_all_links( url_abs_regex => qr<^(?!https?://\Q$hostname\E/)>, );` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Get all outbound links with WWW::Mechanize? by educated_foo (Vicar) on Mar 23, 2011 at 15:43 UTC
Try `url_abs_regex => qr!^https?://(?!$hostname)[^/]*/!`	[reply] [d/l]