Can't get content of <tbody> when parsing HTML in Perl

Question

Can't get content of <tbody> when parsing HTML in Perl

401 Views Asked by AsocPro At 28 October 2025 at 16:26

I HAVE SOLVED THIS:Turns out the page I was loading with WWW::Mechanize uses AJAX to load all the content that is inside the <tbody> so it is not loaded when I created the $html variable. Now I must see how to get this dynamic content...

I am trying to parse through the content of a table in a webpage. The <table> contains a <thead> and a <tbody>. When I go to get the content from the <tbody> part of the table I find that none of it is there. I only get the content that is inside the <thead>.

I have tried a few different methods as follow all of which just give me nothing from inside the <tbody>.

using HTML::TreeBuilder

my $tb = HTML::TreeBuilder->new();
$tb->parse($html);
my $table = $tb->look_down( _tag => 'tbody', id => 'tbody-id' );

using HTML::TableExtract

my $te = HTML::TableExtract->new( attribs => { id => 'table-id' } );
$te->parse($html);
my $table=$te->first_table_found;

when I try to do a print Dumper($table); of of the table I am showing that I am finding the <table> and can only see the table content inside of the <thead> or the <tbody> and a reference to it's parent that contains all the content from <thead>.

I could care less about the content in <thead> I just need the table content out of <tbody>.

I am not sure what I am doing wrong and where to go from here.

Original Q&A

There are 1 best solutions below

**Mike** · Answer 1

Is the HTML valid? It took me a few minutes to get the following code working because I'd not properly closed one of the tags:

use strict;
use warnings;

use HTML::TreeBuilder;
use Perl6::Say;

my $html = << 'HTML';
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
    <head>
        <meta charset="utf-8">
        <title>title</title>
        <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css">
        <script src="script.js"></script>
    </head>
    <body>
        <table>
            <caption>Caption</caption>
            <thead>
                <tr>
                    <th>Header</th>
                </tr>
            </thead>
            <tbody>
                <tr>
                    <td>Body</td>
                </tr>
            </tbody>
        </table>
    </body>
</html>
HTML

my $tree    = HTML::TreeBuilder->new->parse_content($html);
my $table   = $tree->look_down('_tag', 'table');
my $caption = $table->look_down('_tag', 'caption');
my $thead   = $table->look_down('_tag', 'thead');
my $tbody   = $table->look_down('_tag', 'tbody');

say $caption->as_HTML;
# <caption>Caption</caption>

say $thead->as_HTML;
# <thead><tr><th>Header</th></tr></thead>

say $tbody->as_HTML;
# <tbody><tr><td>Body</td></tr></tbody>

Can't get content of <tbody> when parsing HTML in Perl

There are 1 best solutions below

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