How to convert HTML file into a hash in Perl? - perl

Question

Is there any simple way to convert a HTML file into a Perl hash? For example a working Perl modules or something?
I was search on cpan.org but did'nt find anything what can do what I want. I wanna do something like this:
use Example::Module;
my $hashref = Example::Module->new('/path/to/mydoc.html');
After this I want to refer to second div element something like this:
my $second_div = $hashref->{'body'}->{'div'}[1];
# or like this:
my $second_div = $hashref->{'body'}->{'div'}->findByClass('.myclassname');
# or like this:
my $second_div = $hashref->{'body'}->{'div'}->findById('#myid');
Is there any working solution for this?

Answer 1

HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath gives you a lot more power than a simple hash would.
From the synopsis:
use HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath;
my $tree = HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath->new;
$tree->parse_file( "mypage.html");
my $nb=$tree->findvalue('/html/body//p[#class="section_title"]/span[#class="nb"]');
my $id=$tree->findvalue('/html/body//p[#class="section_title"]/#id');
my $p= $html->findnodes('//p[#id="toto"]')->[0];
my $link_texts= $p->findvalue( './a'); # the texts of all a elements in $p
$tree->delete; # to avoid memory leaks, if you parse many HTML documents
More on XPath.

Answer 2

Mojo::DOM (docs found here) builds a simple DOM, that can be accessed in a CSS-selector style:
# Find
say $dom->at('#b')->text;
say $dom->find('p')->pluck('text');
say $dom->find('[id]')->pluck(attr => 'id');
In case you're using xhtml you could also use XML::Simple, which produces a data structure similar to the one you describe.