Sorry to be dense, but what is $obj in your example? I can't figure out why the "print Dumpfile..." clearly prints a text object but trying to save the returned object from Dumpfile gets me an empty value.

I have attached a short program which calls this in case anyone wants to try running it...

Thanks for the help

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use htmltoascii;
use strict;
use LWP::Simple;

my $url = 'https://archive.nrao.edu/archive/ArchiveRouter?SCAN_FILE_ID
+S=181828362';
my $content = get($url);
my $ascii = &htmltoascii::convert($content);
print "test is $ascii\n";
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where I have changed the "convert" sub to:

sub convert {
    my $html = shift;
    
    my $t = HTML::TreeBuilder->new();
    $t->parse($html);
    $t->eof;
    
    my $obj = DumpTable( $_ ), $/, $/ 
    for $t->find_by_tag_name('table') ;
    return($obj);
}
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Sorry to be dense, but what is $obj in your example?

When I read

my $test = DumpTable(...
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I got confused and thought that was the Text::ASCIITable constructor. Of course, that's not the case, so what I said doesn't apply.

---

Please avoid

my ... for ...;
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It straddles edge cases in Perl. my ... if ...; is not allowed, for example, and it's not clear what your code does.

May I recommend

my $table = ( $t->find_by_tag_name('table') )[-1];
return DumpTable($table);
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If the find only returns one table, you can also use

my ($table) = $t->find_by_tag_name('table');
return DumpTable($table);
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Thanks, that makes sense now. Sorry for the bad form with the ellipses... I will be less lazy next time.

I will need to learn more perl before I can understand some of these ways of writing constructors, destructors, etc. But your solution worked and I think I understand what's going on. Thank you!!

You are re-initializing $obj for every call to find_by_tag_name. You need to change your code to something like below:

sub convert {
    my $html = shift;
    
    my $t = HTML::TreeBuilder->new();
    $t->parse($html);
    $t->eof;
    
    my $obj;
       $obj .= DumpTable( $_ ), $/, $/ 
    for $t->find_by_tag_name('table') ;
    return($obj);
}
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