HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath

• SYNOPSIS
• METHODS
• findnodes ($path)
• findnodes_as_string ($path)
• findvalue ($path)
• exists ($path)
• matches($path)
• find ($path)
• SEE ALSO
• AUTHOR
• COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

SYNOPSIS

  use HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath;
  my $tree= HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath->new;
  $tree->parse_file( "mypage.html");
  my $nb=$tree->findvalue( '/html/body//p[@class="section_title"]/span[@class="nb"]');
  my $id=$tree->findvalue( '/html/body//p[@class="section_title"]/@id');

  my $p= $html->findnodes( '//p[@id="toto"]')->[0];
  my $link_texts= $p->findvalue( './a'); # the texts of all a elements in $p
  
  
=head1 DESCRIPTION

This module adds typical XPath methods to HTML::TreeBuilder, to make it easy to query a document.

METHODS

Extra methods added both to the tree object and to each element:

findnodes ($path)

Returns a list of nodes found by $path. In scalar context returns an Tree::XPathEngine::NodeSet object.

findnodes_as_string ($path)

Returns the text values of the nodes

findvalue ($path)

Returns either a Tree::XPathEngine::Literal, a Tree::XPathEngine::Boolean or a Tree::XPathEngine::Number object. If the path returns a NodeSet, $nodeset->xpath_to_literal is called automatically for you (and thus a Tree::XPathEngine::Literal is returned). Note that for each of the objects stringification is overloaded, so you can just print the value found, or manipulate it in the ways you would a normal perl value (e.g. using regular expressions).

exists ($path)

Returns true if the given path exists.

matches($path)

Returns true if the element matches the path.

find ($path)

The find function takes an XPath expression (a string) and returns either a Tree::XPathEngine::NodeSet object containing the nodes it found (or empty if no nodes matched the path), or one of XML::XPathEngine::Literal (a string), XML::XPathEngine::Number, or XML::XPathEngine::Boolean. It should always return something - and you can use ->isa() to find out what it returned. If you need to check how many nodes it found you should check $nodeset->size. See the XML::XPathEngine::NodeSet manpage.

SEE ALSO

the HTML::TreeBuilder manpage

the XML::XPathEngine manpage

AUTHOR

Michel Rodriguez, <imirod@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2006 by Michel Rodriguez

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.8.4 or, at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.