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

Hello monks. I am looking for suggestions/guidance on a problem I am working on.

I have multiple html files that are all slightly different and may contain different tags in each. I want to parse them and convert the tags to a string based on certain rules. For instance:

 <p>  some text </p>

Would get converted to text="some text" At first I was doing this will loops and arrays and regex but the code quickly started growing out of control. Then I tried HTML::TREEBUILDER but it didn't seem to work with the tags the way I needed.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated

Thanks in advannce

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Parsing and converting HTML
by aitap (Curate) on Jul 26, 2012 at 18:50 UTC

    Try writing a recursive function using content_list method of HTML::Element.

    For example, 

    my $html = HTML::TreeBuilder->new_from_content("$text") || die "$@\n";
sub to_text {
 if (ref $_[0] eq "HTML::Element") {
  foreach my $sub_element ($_[0]->content_list) {
   &to_text($sub_element);
  }
 } else {
  print qq{text="$_[0]"};
 }
}
&to_text($html);

    [download]

    Sorry if my advice was wrong.
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]

      Hello, thanks but for some reason this did not seem to work. Though it is probably something I am doing wrong.

      here is my code 

      #!c:/strawberry/perl/bin/perl.exe 
  use HTML::TokeParser;
  use HTML::Element;
  use HTML::TreeBuilder;
  use warnings;

  open(MYINPUTFILE, '<C:\acs\SA\content\acs\meetings\expositions\CNBP_
+028491');
while(<MYINPUTFILE>)
 {
   my $text = $_;
  my $html = HTML::TreeBuilder->new_from_content("$text") || die "$@\n
+";
sub to_text {
 if (ref $_[0] eq "HTML::Element") {
  foreach my $sub_element ($_[0]->content_list) {
   &to_text($sub_element);
  }
 } else {
  print qq{text="$_[0]"};
 }
}
&to_text($html);

}

      [download]

      any other thoughts or did I miss something? Thanks again

[reply]
[d/l]
        You are trying to parse your file by line. Every line an HTML::Element object gets created and then destroyed. You can use new_from_file HTML::TreeBuilder method instead.
        Sorry if my advice was wrong.
[reply]
[d/l]
        my $tree = HTML::TreeBuilder->new;
$tree->parse_file( $filename );
...
[reply]

      Thanks!!! I will give it a try and report back.

[reply]

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