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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-23T02:18:39+00:00

I need to ignore or remove all text in between all HTML elements so

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I need to ignore or remove all text in between all HTML elements so I can generate a blank template from a given web page.

I am parsing using the perl module HTML::TreeBuilder and HTML::Element.

I have tried the ignore_text method noted in the documentation but that doesn’t provide correct results.

I have also tried using DOMXpath with PHP to do the same thing and results seemed too cumbersome to manage. Regex’s might work but are a last resort to me.

This is part of my current code, very basic. Bottom is just output to file. All code is functional I just need formatting to work so I can generate template files.


my $url= "http://www.example.com";

my $page = get($url) or die $!;
my $tree = HTML::TreeBuilder->new_from_content($page);

$tree->parse_file($page);

$tree->ignore_text;
$tree->elementify;

open OUTPUT, "+>".$body;
my $output = $tree->as_HTML;
print OUTPUT $output;
close OUTPUT;

Thanks in advance for the help!

EDIT: I found the problem – the ignore text only works when you parse from a physical file. I had to save the page as a temp file to parse then output the way I wanted with no text then I just did unlink($tmp) at the bottom to delete the file. My script has since grown much more complicated with reading and writing to database and each time I need to create this temp file which is kind of annoying…

Thanks for the reply below!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You are very close.

    It looks like you need to set ignore_text with a true value. $tree->ignore_text(1) and then make sure its set before calling parse_file.

    Sorry this is a bit long but i hope it helps.

    Here is quick pass at the new code, hard to test without example page:

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

$tree->ignore_text(1);
$tree->elementify;
$tree->parse_file( $page );

    Here is my quick test script using a local file:

    use strict;
use warnings;

use HTML::TreeBuilder;

my $page = 'test.html';
my $tree = HTML::TreeBuilder->new();

$tree->ignore_text(1);
$tree->parse_file($page);
$tree->elementify;

print $tree->as_HTML;

    Input test.html:

    <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
  <title>title text</title>
</head>
<body>
  <h1>Heading 1</h1>
  <p>paragraph text</p>
</body>
</html>

    And output:

    <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><title></title></head><body><h1></h1><p></body></html>

    Good luck

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