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in reply to Re^2: Problem getting fields out of an XPath node list
in thread Problem getting fields out of an XPath node list

Finding the value of the list element is not really helping you as the table is not an element of the list. If you know there is only one table, this verbose example may help: 
# get all the tables
my @tables = $tree->findnodes('//table');
# get the first table
my $table = $tables[0];
# get all the rows of first table
my @rows = $table->findnodes('tr');

# loop through the rows
for my $row ( @rows ) {
    # get all the cells
    my @cells = $row->findnodes('td');
    # loop through the cells
    for my $cell ( @cells ) {
        print $cell->as_text, "\n";
    }
}

Output:

Remote Host
Port Number
192.5.5.241
8091

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Re^4: Problem getting fields out of an XPath node list
by ejc1 (Novice) on Mar 29, 2016 at 16:27 UTC
    So, I don't understand why $cell->as_text gives the data, when Dumper \@cells prints a giant ton of garbage. Also, even though I have specified the table element as 
    my @tables = $tree->findnodes('//table');
my $table = $tables[12];

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    I cant reference this directly. Printing @cells[2]->as_text fails outright with "can't call method 'as_text' on an undefined value". It is clearly in there as 
    my @cells = $row->findnodes('td')

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    .... Anything I do to @cells flat out fails except for looking through with the mentioned 
    for my $cell (@cells)...
print $cell->as_text

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    At this junction, I am about to totally give up on this, since I do not understand this at all and have no other way I can parse this otherwise. Since as_text dumps this one entry at a time, I was hoping to process the even elements of @cells as host/ip address and the odd as the previous elements port. But I just don't get this at all.
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      Note that the HTML block you provide is not valid (missing </td>, and a <tr> instead of </tr>). It would help if you showed us your desired output. It may be better to build up a Perl data structure first and then extract the values you need: 
      # ... as before
my @aoa;
for my $row ( @rows ) {
    my @cells = $row->findnodes('td');
    my @ary = map { $_->as_text } @cells;
    push( @aoa, \@ary );
}
print Dumper( \@aoa );

print "Headers:\n";
my $headers = shift @aoa;
print "$headers->[0], $headers->[1]\n";

print "Rows:\n";
for my $ary ( @aoa ) {
    print "$headers->[0]: $ary->[0], $headers->[1]: $ary->[1]\n";
}

Output:

$VAR1 = [
          [
            'Remote Host',
            'Port Number'
          ],
          [
            '192.5.5.241',
            '8091'
          ]
        ];

Headers:
Remote Host, Port Number
Rows:
Remote Host: 192.5.5.241, Port Number: 8091

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