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