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' ],
```

Corion/COWS

NAME

SYNOPSIS

scrape

QUERY SYNTAX

`scrape`