Question

I am trying to extract data from website using perl API. The process is to use a list of uris as input. Then I extract related information for each uri from website. If the information for one uri is not present it dies. Some thing like the code below

my @tags = $c->posts_for(uri =>"$currentURI");
die "No candidate related articles\n" unless @tags;

Now, I don’t want the program to stop if it doesn’t get any tags. I want the program to skip that particular uri and go to the next available uri. How can i do it?
Thank you for your time and help.

Thank you,
Sammed

Answer 1

Well, assuming that you’re inside a loop processing each of the URIs in turn, you should be able to do something like:

next unless @tags;

For example, the following program only prints lines that are numeric:

while (<STDIN>) {
    next unless /^\d+$/;
    print;
}

The loop processes every input line in turn but, when one is found that doesn’t match that regular expression (all numeric), it restarts the loop (for the next input line) without printing.

The same method is used in that first code block above to restart the loop if there are no tags, moving to the next URI.