I know my question title is not that descriptive but let me explain here.

I am trying to parse the given html document using HTML::TreeBuilder. Now in this html document values 5,1,ABC,DEF are to be validated against the user supplied value and if that validation successfull I have to extract href link.

So, my code is :

my @tag = $tree->look_down( _tag => 'tr', class => qr{\bepeven\scompleted\b} ); for (@tag) { query_element($_); } sub query_element { my @td_tag = $_[0]->look_down( _tag => 'td' ); my $num1 = shift @td_tag; #Get the first td tag my $num2 = shift @td_tag; # Get the second td tag #Making sure first/second td tag has numeric value $num1 = $1 if $num1->as_text =~ m!(\d+)! or die "no match found"; $num2 = $1 if $num2->as_text =~ m!(\d+)! or die "no match found"; #Validating that above value's match the user provided value 5 and 1. if ( $num1 eq '5' && $num2 eq '1' ) { say "hurray..!!"; #Iterating over rest of the td tag to make sure we get the right link from it. for (@td_tag) { #Check if contains ABC and than procede to fetch the download href link. if ($_->look_down(_tag => 'td', class => qr{[c]}, sub { $_[0]->as_text eq 'ABC';} ) ) { my $text = $_->as_text; say "Current node text is: ", $text; #outputs ABC #Now from here how do I get the link I want to extract. } } } }

Now, my approach is first extract the value from td tags and match it against the user specified value if it is a success than look for another user specified value either ABC or DEF in my case it is ABC if it matched than only extract the link.

Now, tag containig ABC or DEF has no fixed position but they will be below the tags containing 5 and 1 value. So, I used $_[0]->as_text eq 'ABC'; to chech that the tag contains ABC now in my tree I am currently at text node ABC from here how do I extract the link href i,e how do I move up the object tree and extract value.

PS: I would have tried xpath here but position of html elements is not that well-defined and structured.

EDIT:

So, I tried $_->tag() and returned td but if I am on td tag than the why the following code doesn't work:

my $link_obj = $_->look_down(_tag => 'a') # It should look for `a` tag. say $link_obj->as_text;

But it gives the following error: