Do you have access to the web server machine itself?

If you are talking about web scraping, it behooves you well to understand where HTML files and CGI files, and also from which point on there is no difference between the two.

Personally, I use WWW::Mechanize, or Web::Scraper, or App::scrape. Others have reported good success using Mojolicious. Which one of these have you tried and how did they fail for you?

Hi Corion

Unfortunately I don't have access to the server machine itself, I'm doing it over the internet entirely. I've been using Web::Scraper which works really well with properly formatted HTML but not with CGI. I'm trying to get the URL and name of entries in the table. For example the code I've been using is:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use URI;
use Web::Scraper;

open FILE, ">file.txt" or die $!;

# website to scrape
my $urlToScrape = "http://www.molmovdb.org/cgi-bin/browse.cgi";

# prepare data
my $teamsdata = scraper {
 # we will save the urls from the teams
 process "tr.cell2> A", 'urls[]' => '@href';
 # we will save the team names
 process "tr.cell2> A", 'teams[]' => 'TEXT';
};

# scrape the data
my $res = $teamsdata->scrape(URI->new($urlToScrape));
[download]

Please follow the link given in the code and open its page source for an example? best wishes Dan

There is no conceptual difference between "CGI" and "HTML" when they are accessed over HTTP. If Web::Scraper fails, maybe you can tell us how it fails and where.

Hi Tospo The URL is http://www.molmovdb.org/cgi-bin/browse.cgi I'm trying to follow all the links to the database enties iteratively and output these as text files to analyse later as you can probably see the coding is not formatted amazingly well!? many thanks and best wishes Dan

That page - apart from being marked-up in a rather old-fashioned way - isn't too bad at all. If you look at the page source code, you can easily see a table structure that you can use to parse it.
You will want to use a module like WWW::Mechanize to interact with the website. This moduel allows you to interact with web content like a user would in a browser. You can make your script "click" on links, to get to the text files. Use the table structure of the "browse" page to iterate over all the molecules, each time following the link through to the text data files.
Have a go with a simple example first. There are a few here. If you are getting stuck, post the script you have so far and what's happening so we can help you along. Good luck!

oh and I forgot to mention: you are always parsing the HTML output that the server sends to you. It doesn't matter that this is a cgi script generating the page on the server, the output is just HTML (unless it's a webservice that sends XML, JSON or the like). So there is nothing special about this case.