NAME
    HTML::Filter - Filter HTML text through the parser

NOTE
    This module is deprecated. The "HTML::Parser" now provides the
    functionally of "HTML::Filter" much more efficiently with the "default"
    handler.

SYNOPSIS
     require HTML::Filter;
     $p = HTML::Filter->new->parse_file("index.html");

DESCRIPTION
    "HTML::Filter" is an HTML parser that by default prints the original
    text of each HTML element (a slow version of cat(1) basically). The
    callback methods may be overridden to modify the filtering for some HTML
    elements and you can override output() method which is called to print
    the HTML text.

    "HTML::Filter" is a subclass of "HTML::Parser". This means that the
    document should be given to the parser by calling the $p->parse() or
    $p->parse_file() methods.

EXAMPLES
    The first example is a filter that will remove all comments from an HTML
    file. This is achieved by simply overriding the comment method to do
    nothing.

      package CommentStripper;
      require HTML::Filter;
      @ISA=qw(HTML::Filter);
      sub comment { }  # ignore comments

    The second example shows a filter that will remove any <TABLE>s found in
    the HTML file. We specialize the start() and end() methods to count
    table tags and then make output not happen when inside a table.

      package TableStripper;
      require HTML::Filter;
      @ISA=qw(HTML::Filter);
      sub start
      {
         my $self = shift;
         $self->{table_seen}++ if $_[0] eq "table";
         $self->SUPER::start(@_);
      }

      sub end
      {
         my $self = shift;
         $self->SUPER::end(@_);
         $self->{table_seen}-- if $_[0] eq "table";
      }

      sub output
      {
          my $self = shift;
          unless ($self->{table_seen}) {
              $self->SUPER::output(@_);
          }
      }

    If you want to collect the parsed text internally you might want to do
    something like this:

      package FilterIntoString;
      require HTML::Filter;
      @ISA=qw(HTML::Filter);
      sub output { push(@{$_[0]->{fhtml}}, $_[1]) }
      sub filtered_html { join("", @{$_[0]->{fhtml}}) }

SEE ALSO
    HTML::Parser

COPYRIGHT
    Copyright 1997-1999 Gisle Aas.

    This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
    under the same terms as Perl itself.