HTML::PullParser(3) User Contributed Perl Documentation HTML::PullParser(3)
NAME
HTML::PullParser - Alternative HTML::Parser interface
SYNOPSIS
use HTML::PullParser;
$p = HTML::PullParser->new(file => "index.html",
start => 'event, tagname, @attr',
end => 'event, tagname',
ignore_elements => [qw(script style)],
) || die "Can't open: $!";
while (my $token = $p->get_token) {
#...do something with $token
}
DESCRIPTION
The HTML::PullParser is an alternative interface to the HTML::Parser class. It basically turns the
HTML::Parser inside out. You associate a file (or any IO::Handle object or string) with the parser
at construction time and then repeatedly call $parser->get_token to obtain the tags and text found in
the parsed document.
The following methods are provided:
$p = HTML::PullParser->new( file => $file, %options )
$p = HTML::PullParser->new( doc => \$doc, %options )
A "HTML::PullParser" can be made to parse from either a file or a literal document based on
whether the "file" or "doc" option is passed to the parser's constructor.
The "file" passed in can either be a file name or a file handle object. If a file name is
passed, and it can't be opened for reading, then the constructor will return an undefined value
and $! will tell you why it failed. Otherwise the argument is taken to be some object that the
"HTML::PullParser" can read() from when it needs more data. The stream will be read() until EOF,
but not closed.
A "doc" can be passed plain or as a reference to a scalar. If a reference is passed then the
value of this scalar should not be changed before all tokens have been extracted.
Next the information to be returned for the different token types must be set up. This is done
by simply associating an argspec (as defined in HTML::Parser) with the events you have an
interest in. For instance, if you want "start" tokens to be reported as the string 'S' followed
by the tagname and the attributes you might pass an "start"-option like this:
$p = HTML::PullParser->new(
doc => $document_to_parse,
start => '"S", tagname, @attr',
end => '"E", tagname',
);
At last other "HTML::Parser" options, like "ignore_tags", and "unbroken_text", can be passed in.
Note that you should not use the event_h options to set up parser handlers. That would confuse
the inner logic of "HTML::PullParser".
$token = $p->get_token
This method will return the next token found in the HTML document, or "undef" at the end of the
document. The token is returned as an array reference. The content of this array match the
argspec set up during "HTML::PullParser" construction.
$p->unget_token( @tokens )
If you find out you have read too many tokens you can push them back, so that they are returned
again the next time $p->get_token is called.
EXAMPLES
The 'eg/hform' script shows how we might parse the form section of HTML::Documents using
HTML::PullParser.
SEE ALSO
HTML::Parser, HTML::TokeParser
COPYRIGHT
Copyright 1998-2001 Gisle Aas.
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl
itself.
perl v5.8.8 2006-04-26 HTML::PullParser(3)
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