NAME

COWS - Corion's Own Web Scraper

SYNOPSIS

use 5.020;
use COWS 'scrape';

my $html = '...';
my $rules = [
    {
        name => 'link',
        query => 'a@href',
        munge => ['absolute'],
    },
];
my $res = scrape( $html, $rules, { url => 'https://example.com/' } );

say "url: $_" for $res->{link}->@*;

scrape

scrape( $html, $rules, $options );

QUERY SYNTAX

For each query, a hashref with the following keys is accepted

• name

  The name of this query. This will be used as a key in the resulting hashref.

• query

  The CSS selector or XPath query to search for.

• fields

  Queries that should be matched below this node. The results will get merged into a hashref. Duplicate names are not allowed (duh).

    fields => [
        { name => 'foo', ... },
        { name => 'bar', ... },
        { name => 'baz', ... },
    ]
  

  results in

    { foo => ..., bar => ..., baz => ... }
  

• debug

  Output progress while stepping through this query. This is convenient for finding why a specific query doesn't result in what you think it should.

• single

  Expect only a single item, result will be the value of the query. If the query has a fields field, it will be a hashref of the fields.

  If this key is missing, the result will always be an arrayref.

• index

  Use the n-th node as result. The result will always be a hashref or scalar value. This could be done in XPath but sometimes it's easier to do it here.

• discard

  Do not use this intermediate value but replace it by the arrayref of its fields value.

• html

  Include the value of this node as an HTML string.

• munge

  Apply the functions in the listed order to the value.

• tag

    tag => foo=bar
    tag => baz:bat
  

  Add the key/value to the resulting hash. If the separator is = , the result will be a plain scalar:

    foo => 'bar',
  

  If the separator is :, there can be multiple tags and they are collected in an arrayref:

    baz => [ 'bat' ],