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Asked: 2026-05-17T15:17:17+00:00

Folks, There is so much info out there on HTML::Treebuilder that I’m surprised I

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Folks,

There is so much info out there on HTML::Treebuilder that I’m surprised I can’t find the answer, hopefully I’m not just missing it.

What I’m trying to do is simply parse between parent nodes, so given a html doc like this

<html>
<body>
   <a id="111" name="111"></a>
   <p>something</p>
   <p>something</p>
   <p>something</p>
   <a href=xxx">something</a>
   <a id="222" name="222"></a>
   <p>something</p>
   <p>something</p>
   <p>something</p>
   ....
 </body>
 </html>

I want to be able to get the info about that 1st anchor tag (111), then process the 3 p tags and then get the next anchor tag (222) and then process those p tags etc etc.

Its easy to get to each anchor tag

use HTML::TreeBuilder;
my $tree = HTML::TreeBuilder->new();
$tree->parse_file("index-01.htm");
foreach my $atag ( $tree->look_down( '_tag', 'a' ) ) {
    if ($atag->attr('id')) {
        # Found 'a' tag, now process the p tags until the next 'a'
    }
}

But once I find that tag how do I then get all the p tags until the next anchor?

TIA!!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    HTML::TreeBuilder version

    #!/usr/bin/perl

use strict; use warnings;
use HTML::TreeBuilder;

my $tree = HTML::TreeBuilder->new;

$tree->parse_file(\*DATA);
$tree->elementify;
$tree->objectify_text;

foreach my $atag ( $tree->look_down( '_tag', 'a' ) ) {
    if ($atag->attr('id')) {
        printf "Found %s\n", $atag->as_XML;
        process_p( $atag );
    }
}

sub process_p {
    my ($tag) = @_;
    while ( defined( $tag ) and defined( my $next = $tag->right ) ) {
        last if lc $next->tag eq 'a';
        if ( lc $next->tag eq 'p') {
            $next->deobjectify_text;
            print $next->as_text, "\n";
        }
        $tag = $next;
    }
}

__DATA__
<html>
<body>
   <a id="111" name="111"></a>
   <p>something</p>
   <p>something</p>
   <p>something</p>sometext
   <a href=xxx">something</a>
   <a id="222" name="222"></a>
   <p>something</p>
   <p>something</p>
   <p>something</p>
 </body>
 </html>

    Output:

    Found <a id="111" name="111"></a>

something
something
something
Found <a id="222" name="222"></a>

something
something
something

    HTML::TokeParser::Simple version

    #!/usr/bin/perl

use strict; use warnings;
use HTML::TokeParser::Simple;

my $parser = HTML::TokeParser::Simple->new(\*DATA);

while ( my $tag = $parser->get_tag('a') ) {
    next unless $tag->get_attr('id');
    printf "Found %s\n", $tag->as_is;
    process_p($parser);
}

sub process_p {
    my ($parser) = @_;
    while ( my $next = $parser->get_token ) {
        if ( $next->is_start_tag('a') ) {
            $parser->unget_token($next);
            return;
        }
        elsif ( $next->is_start_tag('p') ) {
            print $parser->get_text('/p'), "\n";
        }
    }
    return;
}

    Output:

    Found <a id="111" name="111">
something
something
something
Found <a id="222" name="222">
something
something
something
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