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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-17T17:10:32+00:00

pQuery is a pragmatic port of the jQuery JavaScript framework to Perl which can

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pQuery is a pragmatic port of the jQuery JavaScript framework to Perl which can be used for screen scraping.

pQuery quite sensitive to malformed HTML. Consider the following example:

use pQuery;

my $html_malformed = "<html><head><title>foo</title></head><body>bar</body></html>>";
my $page = pQuery($html_malformed);
my $title = $page->find("title");
print "The title is: ", $title->html, "\n";

pQuery won’t find the title tag in the example above due to the double “>>” in the malformed HTML.

To make my pQuery based applications more tolerant to malformed HTML I need to pre-process the HTML by cleaning it up before passing it to pQuery.

Starting with the code fragment given above, what is the most robust pure-perl way to clean-up the HTML to make it parse:able by pQuery?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’d report this as a bug in pQuery. Here’s a workaround:

    use HTML::TreeBuilder;
use pQuery;

my $html_malformed = "<html><head><title>foo</title></head><body>bar</body></html>>";
my $html_cleaned = HTML::TreeBuilder->new_from_content($html_malformed);
my $page = pQuery($html_cleaned->as_HTML);
$html_cleaned->delete;
my $title = $page->find("title");
print "The title is: ", $title->html, "\n";

    This doesn’t make a lot of sense, since pQuery already uses HTML::TreeBuilder as its underlying parsing mechanism, but it does work.

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