Question

I am working with a parsing an HTML table in Perl using HTML::Query. I want to go through each row of the table and look at a certain cell. However, when I use this query…

my @resultsrows = $query->query('table#player_matches.tabelle_grafik tr')->get_elements();

…I run into a problem where each row of this outermost table is not represented alone. What I mean is, while the first element of this array is the first row in the outermost table I am working with, the second one refers to another table row within that first row because one of the cells has a completely new table within it.

For further explanation; when I try to loop through it:

for(my $i = 1; $i < @resultsrows; $i++) {
    @currentrow = $query->query('td span'); ## The cell I am looking for is the only one with a span.
    if($currentrow[0]->attr('title') eq $searchterm) {
        $returnedIndex = $i;
    }
}

Is there any CSS selector that I can use in this query that will allow me to select only the outermost table and avoid this problem? Would HTML::Tree help with this?

EDIT: I have tried to use > to denote only direct children, but it is not gathering any rows then: my @resultsrows = $query->query('table#player_matches.tabelle_grafik > tr')->get_elements();

Answer 1

Perhaps you’re working with a DOM that collects all tr children of a table within a tbody (which is what browsers usually do).

Does this work?

@resultsrows = $query->query('table#player_matches.tabelle_grafik > tbody > tr')->get_elements();