How can I screen scrape with Perl?

Question

I need to display some values that are stored in a website, for that I need to scrape the website and fetch the content from the table. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Check out this little example of web scraping with perl: link text

Answer 2

If you are familiar with jQuery you might want to check out pQuery, which makes this very easy:

## print every <h2> tag in page
use pQuery;

pQuery("http://google.com/search?q=pquery")
    ->find("h2")
    ->each(sub {
        my $i = shift;
        print $i + 1, ") ", pQuery($_)->text, "\n";
    });

There's also HTML::DOM.

Whatever you do, though, don't use regular expressions for this.

Answer 3

I use LWP::UserAgent for most of my screen scraping needs. You can also Couple that with HTTP::Cookies if you need Cookies support.

Here's a simple example on how to get source.

use LWP;
use HTTP::Cookies;
my $cookie_jar = HTTP::Cookies->new;
my $browser = LWP::UserAgent->new;
$browser->cookie_jar($cookie_jar);

$resp = $browser->get("https://www.stackoverflow.com");
if($resp->is_success) {
   # Play with your source here
   $source = $resp->content;
   $source =~ s/^.*<table>/<table>/i; # this is just an example 
   print $source;                     # not a solution to your problem.
}

Answer 4

You could also use this simple perl module WEB::Scraper, this is simple to understand and make life easy for me. follow this example for more information.

http://teusje.wordpress.com/2010/05/02/web-scraping-with-perl/