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

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.