[ABE.pm] Using TreeBuilder

Tue Nov 15 13:55:57 PST 2005

There's something (well, many things, I'm sure!) I'm not getting about
TreeBuilder.  Here's an example of what I'm trying to do:

I've got a table that looks like this:

<HTML>
<BODY>
<table>
<tr>
    <td>Kiss</td> <td>Alive!</td> <td>Dressed To Kill</td>
</tr>
<tr>
    <td>Kate Bush</td> <td>The Kick Inside</td> <td>Hounds of Love</td> <td>Ariel</td>
</tr>
<tr>
    <td>The Who</td> <td>The Kids are Alright</td> </td>Who's Next</td>
</tr>
</table>
</BODY>
</HTML>

I want to loop through the table and if the first column is equal to
"Kate Bush", put the rest of the row into
variables/arrays/hashes/whatever.

Not only can I not get past the first row, the code to print the
contents of the data cells is ugly, IMO:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use HTML::TreeBuilder;
# Let's walk through the forms....

my $tree = HTML::TreeBuilder->new;
    $tree->parse_file("simple.html");

# we found a table row
my $node = $tree->look_down("_tag", "tr") ;

#this prints out the first row
foreach my $item ($node->content_list()) {
    foreach my $jtem ($item->content_list()){
        print "jtem is $jtem\n";
    }
}

# find the next row
print "Looking for the next row\n";

# I assumed this would increment to the next row, but it doesn't. :-( 
# it prints the first row again.
$node = $tree->look_down("_tag", "tr");
foreach my $item ($node->content_list()) {
    foreach my $jtem ($item->content_list()){
        print "jtem is $jtem\n";
    }
}

#the first row, again! 
$node = $tree->look_down("_tag", "td");
print @{$node->content()}[0]."\n";
if (@{$node->content()}[0] eq "Kate Bush") {
    print @{$node->content()}[0]."\n";
    print @{$node->content()}[1]."\n";
    print @{$node->content()}[2]."\n";
}

$tree->delete();   

exit(0);

-- 

Regards,

Faber Fedor
President
Linux New Jersey, Inc.
908-320-0357
800-706-0701

http://www.linuxnj.com