Question

I’m using WWW::Mechanize to query the Twitter API and storing the (XML) results into @content

Now I want to search through that content for user IDs (the data I want is always stored between <id>...</id> tags). The following regex works perfectly on a downloaded file:

for ( @content ) {
  if (m/<id>(\d+)<\/id>/) { 
    print "$1\n";
   }
}

but it won’t work on the @content array that I create with Mechanize, when it will only give me a single match.

I’ve tried using the look between method that I found elsewhere on StackOverflow but that seems to have been a red herring:

m/(?<=<id>)(\d{1,})(?=<\/id>)/g

I’m missing something, but (after years of always finding the answer on StackOverflow or elsewhere) I’m stumped. Clearly I don’t even know how to ask the correct question. What am I missing? Is it something to do with the way that Mechanize stores the array?

Answer 1

Try this:

use strict;
use warnings;
use WWW::Mechanize;
use Data::Dumper;

my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();

my $url = "http://api.twitter.com/1/followers/ids/twitter.xml";

$mech->get( $url );

# $mech->content is string

#print Dumper ($mech->content);

my @data = split /\n/ , $mech->content;

foreach (@data)
{
# $VAR4987 = '<id>340750222</id>';
    if (/<id>(\d+)<\/id>/)
    {
        print $1; print "\n";
    }
}