Question

All,
I realise against gooogle ToC but I was trying to write a perl script that performs a google search and returns the number of hits (eg the 1 of about XXXX for search term). I should state I am perl newbie.

After reading etc this is what I have but it does not return any thing and I’m not sure why…can anyone give me some pointers.

use LWP::Simple;

my $ua = new LWP::UserAgent;
$ua->agent('Mozilla/5.0');

my $url=$ARGV[0];
my $req = HTTP::Request->new(GET => $url);
my $res = $ua->request($req);

$res->content;  

print "all done \n";    

while ($res ==~ /of about <b>([1234567890,]<\/b> +)/) {
  print $res;
}

Answer 1

The line:

while ($res ==~ /of about <b>([1234567890,]<\/b> +)/) {

Has the following errors:

• While statement will cause an endless loop if the string matches,
  because…
• …the regex lacks the /g global option, which would be useless
  because…
• …I assume this match will happen only once.
• [1234567890,] will only match one character, and is better written
  [0-9,]+. Note the plus sign at the end to allow multiple matches.
• ==~ should be =~
• $res should probably be $res->content, like a’r stated in the
  comment.
• Your capture group extends beyond the </b> tag, which I suppose is
  a typo?

Also, you print out the whole $res object, when you probably only want to print the number.
More correct version:

if ($res->content =~ /of about <b>([0-9,]+)/) { print $1 }