perl-HTML-TableExtract

HTML::TableExtract is a subclass of HTML::Parser that serves to extract the
information from tables of interest contained within an HTML document. The
information from each extracted table is stored in table objects. Tables
can be extracted as text, HTML, or HTML::ElementTable structures (for
in-place editing or manipulation).
There are currently four constraints available to specify which tables you
would like to extract from a document: Headers, Depth, Count, and
Attributes.
Headers, the most flexible and adaptive of the techniques, involves
specifying text in an array that you expect to appear above the data in the
tables of interest. Once all headers have been located in a row of that
table, all further cells beneath the columns that matched your headers are
extracted. All other columns are ignored: think of it as vertical slices
through a table. In addition, TableExtract automatically rearranges each
row in the same order as the headers you provided. If you would like to
disable this, set automap to 0 during object creation, and instead rely
on the column_map() method to find out the order in which the headers were
found. Furthermore, TableExtract will automatically compensate for cell
span issues so that columns are really the same columns as you would
visually see in a browser. This behavior can be disabled by setting the
gridmap parameter to 0. HTML is stripped from the entire textual content
of a cell before header matches are attempted -- unless the keep_html
parameter was enabled.
Depth and Count are more specific ways to specify tables in relation to
one another. Depth represents how deeply a table resides in other tables.
The depth of a top-level table in the document is 0. A table within a
top-level table has a depth of 1, and so on. Each depth can be thought of
as a layer; tables sharing the same depth are on the same layer. Within
each of these layers, Count represents the order in which a table was
seen at that depth, starting with 0. Providing both a depth and a count
will uniquely specify a table within a document.
Attributes match based on the attributes of the html <table> tag, for
example, border widths or background color.
Each of the Headers, Depth, Count, and Attributes specifications
are cumulative in their effect on the overall extraction. For instance, if
you specify only a Depth, then you get all tables at that depth (note
that these could very well reside in separate higher- level tables
throughout the document since depth extends across tables). If you specify
only a Count, then the tables at that Count from all depths are
returned (i.e., the n_th occurrence of a table at each depth). If you only
specify _Headers, then you get all tables in the document containing those
column headers. If you have specified multiple constraints of Headers,
Depth, Count, and Attributes, then each constraint has veto power
over whether a particular table is extracted.
If no Headers, Depth, Count, or Attributes are specified, then all
tables match.
When extracting only text from tables, the text is decoded with
HTML::Entities by default; this can be disabled by setting the decode
parameter to 0.

          

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License: Artistic-1.0 OR GPL-1.0-or-later
URL: https://metacpan.org/release/HTML-TableExtract