TableContentParser(3)

NAME
HTML::TableContentParser - Do interesting things with the contents of tables.

SYNOPSIS
  use HTML::TableContentParser;
  $p = HTML::TableContentParser->new();
  $tables = $p->parse($html);

DESCRIPTION
This package pulls out the contents of a table from a string containing HTML. Each time a table is encountered, data will be stored in an array consisting of a hash of whatever was discovered about the table -- id, name, border, cellspacing etc, and of course data contained within the table.

The format of each hash will look something like

  attributes            keys from the attributes of the <table> tag
  @{$table_headers}     array of table headers, in order found
  @{$table_rows}        rows discovered, in order

If the table has a caption, this will be provided as

  caption               keys from the caption tag's attributes
    data                the text of the <caption>..</caption> element

then for each table row,
    @{$table_data} td's found, in order
    other attributes the ... in <tr ...>

then for each data cell,
      data what comes between <td> and </td>
      other attributes the ... in <td ...>

  EXAMPLE
  use HTML::TableContentParser;
  $p = HTML::TableContentParser->new();
        $html = read_html_from_somewhere();
  $tables = $p->parse($html);
  for $t (@$tables) {
    for $r (@{$t->{rows}}) {
                        print "Row: ";
      for $c (@{$r->{cells}}) {
        print "[$c->{data}] ";
      }
      print "\n";
    }
  }

METHODS

start($parser, $tag, $attr, $attrseq, $origtext);
    Called whenever a particular start tag has been recognised. This is called automatically by the parser and should not be called from the application.

text($parser, $content);
    Called whenever a piece of content is encountered. This is called automatically by the parser and should not be called from the application.

end($parser, $tag, $origtext);
    Called whenever a particular end tag is encountered. This is called automatically by the parser and should not be called from the application.

$tables_ref = $p->parse($html);
    Called with the HTML to parse. This is all the application needs to do. The return value will be an arrayref containing each table encountered, in the format detailed above.

DEBUG
    Not a method, but a class variable. Set to 1 to cause debugging output (basically the structure and content of the table) to be sent to stdout via warn().

  EXPORTS
Nothing.

  CAVEATS, BUGS, and TODO

AUTHOR
  Simon Drabble  E<lt>sdrabble@cpan.orgE<gt>

  (C) 2002  Simon Drabble

This software is released under the same terms as perl.