Good morning everyone. I've written a script to scrape posts off of an internet forum, but I'm having problems with one last part. Each post has a link in a specific location, but the link text is different on each post. Because of this, I can't program a static value in the find_link command. I thought I got around this by using the following bit of code: 
$mech->find_link( text => "$PrevMsgLink");
my $topic_obj = $mech->find_link (text_regex => qr/$PrevMsgLink/i );
my $PrevMsg = $topic_obj->url;

[download]
This worked great until I ran into a post where the link had special characters: "eBay item 380565801 (Ends Jul-09-02 144739 PDT) -" When the script sees this, it dies out with the following error:

"Can't call method "url" on an undefined value at C:\Documents and Settings\Tony\Desktop\Perl\....."

So the question is, what can I do to get the script to find links with special characters? I've searched the site here, and read the manpages for the applicable modules and come up with nothing. I'll admit, I'm still a novice at all of this, and have looked right past my own answers before. Be gentle.

Thanks much in advance! tony

In reply to How can I handle special characters in mech->find_link by SpacemanSpiff

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