This module is a simple HTML parser. It is similar in concept to HTML::Parser, but it differs from
HTML::TreeBuilder in a couple of important ways.
First, HTML::TreeBuilder knows which tags can contain other tags, which start tags have corresponding end
tags, which tags can exist only in the <HEAD> portion of the document, and so forth. HTML::SimpleParse
does not know any of these things. It just finds tags and text in the HTML you give it, it does not care
about the specific content of these tags (though it does distiguish between different _types_ of tags,
such as comments, starting tags like <b>, ending tags like </b>, and so on).
Second, HTML::SimpleParse does not create a hierarchical tree of HTML content, but rather a simple linear
list. It does not pay any attention to balancing start tags with corresponding end tags, or which pairs
of tags are inside other pairs of tags.
Because of these characteristics, you can make a very effective HTML filter by sub-classing
HTML::SimpleParse. For example, to remove all comments from HTML:
package NoComment;
use HTML::SimpleParse;
@ISA = qw(HTML::SimpleParse);
sub output_comment {}
package main;
NoComment->new($some_html)->output;
Historically, I started the HTML::SimpleParse project in part because of a misunderstanding about
HTML::Parser's functionality. Many aspects of these two modules actually overlap. I continue to
maintain the HTML::SimpleParse module because people seem to be depending on it, and because beginners
sometimes find HTML::SimpleParse to be simpler than HTML::Parser's more powerful interface. People also
seem to get a fair amount of usage out of the "parse_args()" method directly.
Methods
• new
$p = new HTML::SimpleParse( $some_html );
Creates a new HTML::SimpleParse object. Optionally takes one argument, a string containing some HTML
with which to initialize the object. If you give it a non-empty string, the HTML will be parsed into
a tree and ready for outputting.
Can also take a list of attributes, such as
$p = new HTML::SimpleParse( $some_html, 'fix_case' => -1);
See the "parse_args()" method below for an explanation of this attribute.
• text
$text = $p->text;
$p->text( $new_text );
Get or set the contents of the HTML to be parsed.
• tree
foreach ($p->tree) { ... }
Returns a list of all the nodes in the tree, in case you want to step through them manually or
something. Each node in the tree is an anonymous hash with (at least) three data members,
$node->{type} (is this a comment, a start tag, an end tag, etc.), $node->{content} (all the text
between the angle brackets, verbatim), and $node->{offset} (number of bytes from the beginning of the
string).
The possible values of $node->{type} are "text", "starttag", "endtag", "ssi", and "markup".
• parse
$p->parse;
Once an object has been initialized with some text, call $p->parse and a tree will be created. After
the tree is created, you can call $p->output. If you feed some text to the new() method, parse will
be called automatically during your object's construction.
• parse_args
%hash = $p->parse_args( $arg_string );
This routine is handy for parsing the contents of an HTML tag into key=value pairs. For instance:
$text = 'type=checkbox checked name=flavor value="chocolate or strawberry"';
%hash = $p->parse_args( $text );
# %hash is ( TYPE=>'checkbox', CHECKED=>undef, NAME=>'flavor',
# VALUE=>'chocolate or strawberry' )
Note that the position of the last m//g search on the string (the value returned by Perl's pos()
function) will be altered by the parse_args function, so make sure you take that into account if (in
the above example) you do "$text =~ m/something/g".
The parse_args() method can be run as either an object method or as a class method, i.e. as either
$p->parse_args(...) or HTML::SimpleParse->parse_args(...).
HTML attribute lists are supposed to be case-insensitive with respect to attribute names. To achieve
this behavior, parse_args() respects the 'fix_case' flag, which can be set either as a package global
$FIX_CASE, or as a class member datum 'fix_case'. If set to 0, no case conversion is done. If set
to 1, all keys are converted to upper case. If set to -1, all keys are converted to lower case. The
default is 1, i.e. all keys are uppercased.
If an attribute takes no value (like "checked" in the above example) then it will still have an entry
in the returned hash, but its value will be "undef". For example:
%hash = $p->parse_args('type=checkbox checked name=banana value=""');
# $hash{CHECKED} is undef, but $hash{VALUE} is ""
This method actually returns a list (not a hash), so duplicate attributes and order will be preserved
if you want them to be:
@hash = $p->parse_args("name=family value=gwen value=mom value=pop");
# @hash is qw(NAME family VALUE gwen VALUE mom VALUE pop)
• output
$p->output;
This will output the contents of the HTML, passing the real work off to the output_text,
output_comment, etc. functions. If you do not override any of these methods, this module will output
the exact text that it parsed into a tree in the first place.
• get_output
print $p->get_output
Similar to $p->output(), but returns its result instead of printing it.
• execute
foreach ($p->tree) {
print $p->execute($_);
}
Executes a single node in the HTML parse tree. Useful if you want to loop through the nodes and
output them individually.
The following methods do the actual outputting of the various parts of the HTML. Override some of them
if you want to change the way the HTML is output. For instance, to strip comments from the HTML,
override the output_comment method like so:
# In subclass:
sub output_comment { } # Does nothing
• output_text
• output_comment
• output_endtag
• output_starttag
• output_markup
• output_ssi
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