I am an intermediate perl user and have not been able to find any documentation on how to extract a column from a table using HTML::TableExtract. I am trying to extract historical financial statement data from www.marketwatch.com. The link to the url is here: Marketwatch.com. I essentially want to transpose the table at depth=1, count=1 after extracting it so that each year is a row and each variable is a column.
The following simple program downloads the data using WWW::Mechanize and extracts the table with HTML::TableExtract and prints the output of each row.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use HTML::TableExtract;
use WWW::Mechanize;
use strict;
my $marketwatch = WWW::Mechanize->new( autocheck => 1 );
$marketwatch->get("http://www.marketwatch.com/tools/quotes/financials.asp?symb=ABSD&sid=0&report=2&
+freq=0");
chomp(my $html = $marketwatch->content);
my $table = HTML::TableExtract->new(keep_html=>0, depth => 1, count => 1, br_translate => 0 );
$table->parse($html);
foreach my $row ($table->rows) {
print join("\t", @$row), "\n";
}
I am not able to figure out how to use the columns method. My intuition makes me think it should be something like the following (but my intuition is wrong):
foreach my $column ($table->columns) {
print join("\t", @$column), "\n";
}
The error message I get says: Can't locate object method "columns" via package "HTML::TableExtract". The documentation doesn't shed much light (for me anyway). I can see in the code of the module that the columns method belongs to HTML::TableExtract::Table, but I can't figure out how to use it.
I appreciate any help.
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