LWP::UserAgent

A UserAgent will not handle cookies unless you tell it to, by assigning it an empty cookie jar:

$Ua->cookie_jar( {} );

Perl HTML parsing - text nodes

As far as I can see, text nodes are accessed via the HTML::Element content_list method: this returns a list of child nodes. The members of this list are either HTML::Element object references, or strings of text.

HTML::Element also has as_text which returns all text under a node.

Perl HTML parsing - look_down

look_down is a method of HTML::Element.

If an attr_value parameter is a qr() then it is supposed to do a regexp match for you, but I couldn't make this work. I had to use

$link = $root->look_down( _tag => 'a', sub { $_[0]->attr('title') =~ qr(^Cool); } );

instead of

$link = $root->look_down( _tag => 'a', title => qr(^Cool) );

Perl bitwise operators

Beware - Perl is not SQL, and == has higher precedence than &, so if you have this

if ($flags & 3 == 3)

you are not performing a useful test. Parenthesise

if ( ($flags & 3) == 3)