So I've been dabbling with perl lately and this is how I feel today:

See full comic here.

I'm going to go through a simple image scraping program I conjured today. I wrote this to scrape images off a t-shirt gallery so that I could help my friend make a choice on his favourite one offline. \()/ Proud to be a nerd \()/

So for perl of course there already are modules on CPAN to help. I'm using two:

• WWW:Mechanize [ This is a pretty famous module and can be used for some automation, downloading content from the web etc]
• HTML::TokeParser [ We'll use this to parse the html and get to the tag we want. ]

My target html looked like this:

My "algorithm" went something like:

• I used WWW::Mechanize::get() to get the page I wanted.
• After this I supplied the page to Html::TokerParser.
• From here I went looping through all the tags using the get_tag function till I found one with the gallery-img2 class.
• Then I jumped to the next img tag and got the src attribute.
• And finally I used WWW::Mechanize::get to download the image for me.

The code is thoroughly commented:

Any feedback, insults and improvements are welcome! :)