Re^2: WWW::Mechanize::Firefox CSS Selectors

use WWW::Mechanize::Firefox;

my $firefox = WWW::Mechanize::Firefox -> new (
  tab=>"current",
);

$firefox -> get("http://feeds.cbsnews.com/podcast_eveningnews_video_1?
+tag=contentMain%3bcontentBody");
$firefox -> click ({selector => 'a'});

<>;
[download]

This is the entire script and every time I run it, I get the following error

No elements found for CSS selector 'a' at test.pl line 8
[download]

The script doesn't stall, as you mentioned and which is the problem covered in the troubleshooting, it just ends after this message. Somehow I can't access any CSS Selectors on that page

Comment on Re^2: WWW::Mechanize::Firefox CSS Selectors Select or Download Code

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Re^3: WWW::Mechanize::Firefox CSS Selectors by Corion (Patriarch) on Jun 25, 2012 at 11:34 UTC
Have you printed `$mech->content`? I assume that Firefox only supports CSS selectors for HTML. The page you gave is RSS (or ATOM or whatever other feed format). I assume that Firefox does not want to run CSS queries against RSS. Replacing your call to `->click` with a simple call that returns the elements shows that no elements get found for either `->selector` or `->xpath`. `use WWW::Mechanize::Firefox; my $firefox = WWW::Mechanize::Firefox -> new ( ); $firefox -> get("http://feeds.cbsnews.com/podcast_eveningnews_video_1? +tag=contentMain%3bcontentBody"); print $firefox->ct; print $_->{innerHTML} for $firefox->selector('a'); print $_->{innerHTML} for $firefox->xpath('//a');` [download] I'm not sure what goes wrong here, but I assume that Firefox does not really support CSS or XPath queries for documents other than HTML documents. Even if it did, I highly doubt that the surrounding event model would support the `->click` event as HTML pages do. You can consider looking at Mojolicious, Web::Magic, Web::Scraper or App::scrape, all of whom do not munge the RSS through Firefox and all of whom support CSS and XPath queries - maybe you have more luck extracting the URLs with those.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^4: WWW::Mechanize::Firefox CSS Selectors by Lobatto (Initiate) on Jun 25, 2012 at 11:38 UTC
Ok, thanks for the answer I'll have a look the given links. Kind regards	[reply]
Re^5: WWW::Mechanize::Firefox CSS Selectors by Corion (Patriarch) on Jun 25, 2012 at 11:54 UTC
At least part of the problem that the RSS contains entity-encoded HTML which is inaccessible to CSS and XPath queries. I would look at one of the dedicated RSS parsers for extracting the relevant elements. At least the commonly used HTML::TreeBuilder "messes up" the document tree for RSS documents.	[reply]