Web Scraping in Perl: Step-by-Step Guide

In this guide, I will cover everything you need to know to start web scraping in Perl, including the tools you’ll use, how to extract data, and how to handle everyday challenges. By the end of this tutorial, you should be able to scrape data from most websites and work with the information you collect. So, let’s dive in.

What is Web Scraping?

Web scraping is the process of extracting data from websites. It involves fetching the HTML content of a webpage and then parsing it to find and collect the relevant data. The data you gather can include text, images, or other publicly available resources on the web. Web scraping is widely used in data mining, research, and analysis.

However, it’s essential to remember that web scraping must comply with a website’s terms of service, as scraping can sometimes violate their rules. Always ensure you can scrape the site and respect their robots.txt file.

Enhance Your Scraping Operation

Before we dive in into the manual Perl web scraping guide, I suggest you go over these 5 web scraping tools and see if any of them are a good solution for your project:

1. Bright Data — Best overall for advanced scraping; features extensive proxy management and reliable APIs.
2. Octoparse — User-friendly no-code tool for automated data extraction from websites.
3. ScrapingBee — Developer-oriented API that handles proxies, browsers, and CAPTCHAs efficiently.
4. Scrapy — Open-source Python framework ideal for data crawling and scraping tasks.
5. ScraperAPI — Handles tough scrapes with advanced anti-bot technologies; great for developers.

Important! I am not affiliated with any of the providers mentioned above. Now, let’s continue.

Why Choose Perl for Web Scraping?

Perl is an ideal choice for web scraping because:

• Text Processing Power: Perl is well known for its ability to manipulate and extract text, which is essential for scraping web pages.
• Rich Libraries: There are plenty of Perl modules, such as LWP, HTTP::Tiny, and HTML::Parser, that simplify the process.
• Cross-Platform: Perl runs on various platforms like Windows, Linux, and macOS, making it versatile for different environments.

Setting Up Perl for Web Scraping

Before you start scraping websites, you need to install Perl and the required modules.

Step 1: Install Perl

If you don’t have Perl installed on your system, you can download it from perl.org. On Linux and macOS, Perl usually comes pre-installed. On Windows, you can install Strawberry Perl, which includes a full Perl environment.

Step 2: Install Required Modules

To make web scraping easier, you’ll need a few Perl modules. The most common ones are:

• LWP::UserAgent — To handle HTTP requests.
• HTML::Parser — To parse HTML content.
• Mojo::DOM — A lightweight DOM parser, similar to jQuery.
• URI — For URL parsing.

You can install these modules using CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network):

cpan LWP::UserAgent HTML::Parser Mojo::DOM URI

Alternatively, you can use cpanm (CPAN Minus) to install modules:

cpanm LWP::UserAgent HTML::Parser Mojo::DOM URI

Basic Web Scraping in Perl

Let’s start by scraping data from a simple website. We’ll use LWP::UserAgent for HTTP requests and HTML::Parser to extract the data.

Example 1: Scraping Titles from a Website

Imagine you want to scrape the titles of articles from a news website. Here’s how you could do it:

Imagine you want to scrape the titles of articles from a news website. Here’s how you could do it:

use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTML::Parser;
# Create a user agent object
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
# Specify the URL you want to scrape
my $url = 'https://example.com';
# Make the HTTP request
my $response = $ua->get($url);
# Check if the request was successful
if ($response->is_success) {
my $html_content = $response->decoded_content;
# Create a new HTML parser
my $parser = HTML::Parser->new(api_version => 3);
# Define how to handle the data
$parser->handler(start => &start_tag, "tagname, attr, text");
# Parse the HTML content
$parser->parse($html_content);
} else {
die "Error fetching $url: " . $response->status_line;
}
# Function to handle the start of a tag
sub start_tag {
my ($tagname, $attr, $text) = @_;
# Check for

tags (or whatever the tag is that holds titles)

if ($tagname eq 'h2') {
print "Title: $textn";
}
}

Explanation of the Code:

• LWP::UserAgent is used to send an HTTP request to the website.
• HTML::Parser is used to parse the HTML content. It identifies the
  

  tags (which typically contain article titles) and prints them.

• The function start_tag is called whenever the parser encounters a tag. We check if the tag is
  

  and print the content.

Example 2: Scraping Data with Mojo::DOM

Mojo::DOM is a modern, powerful library for web scraping in Perl. It simplifies the process of navigating HTML content by providing a jQuery-like interface.

use Mojo::DOM;
use LWP::UserAgent;
# Initialize user agent
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
# Specify the URL to scrape
my $url = 'https://example.com';
# Make HTTP request
my $response = $ua->get($url);
my $html_content = $response->decoded_content;
# Create Mojo DOM object
my $dom = Mojo::DOM->new($html_content);
# Extract all

titles

for my $title ($dom->find('h2')->each) {
print "Title: " . $title->text . "n";
}

Explanation:

• Mojo::DOM makes it easy to select and iterate through HTML elements.
• The $dom->find(‘h2’) method finds all
  

  tags, and the each method allows iteration over each element.

Handling Dynamic Content

Some websites load content dynamically using JavaScript. Perl’s built-in modules cannot handle JavaScript directly, but there are ways around this.

Solution: Using Headless Browsers

To scrape dynamic content, you can use a headless browser like Selenium. While Perl doesn’t have a direct Selenium module, you can control Selenium through its WebDriver API.

Here’s a simple example using Selenium::Remote::Driver:

use Selenium::Remote::Driver;
# Create a new Selenium driver instance
my $driver = Selenium::Remote::Driver->new;
# Navigate to a website
$driver->get('https://example.com');
# Wait for the page to load
sleep 5;
# Extract the page source
my $html_content = $driver->get_page_source;
# Process HTML content as needed
print $html_content;
# Close the driver
$driver->quit;

Explanation:

Selenium is a powerful tool for automating web browsers. The above example uses a headless browser to load the page and retrieve the HTML content.

Handling Anti-Scraping Measures

Many websites deploy measures to prevent scraping, such as CAPTCHAs, IP blocking, or rate limiting. To avoid detection, you can:

1. Use User-Agent Rotation — Many websites block requests based on the user agent. Use a variety of user-agent strings. Read more on how to use user-agents for web scraping.
2. Limit Request Frequency — Avoid overloading the server with too many requests. Implement pauses between requests.
3. Use Proxy Servers — Rotate IP addresses using proxies to reduce the chance of being blocked. Check out my list of the best rotating proxies.

Here’s an example of setting a custom user-agent in Perl:

use LWP::UserAgent;
# Create a user agent object with a custom user-agent string
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
$ua->agent('Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.36');
# Send a request
my $response = $ua->get('https://example.com');

Storing Scraped Data

Once you’ve scraped the data, you’ll likely want to store it for later use. You can store data in:

• CSV files — Useful for structured data.
• Databases — If you need more powerful querying and persistence.
• JSON — Ideal for hierarchical or nested data.

Here’s how to save the scraped titles to a CSV file:

use Text::CSV;
# Create a new CSV object
my $csv = Text::CSV->new({ binary => 1, auto_diag => 1 });
# Open a CSV file for writing
open my $fh, '>', 'titles.csv' or die "Could not open file: $!";
# Write the header row
$csv->say($fh, ["Title"]);
# Write the scraped titles to the CSV
for my $title ($dom->find('h2')->each) {
$csv->say($fh, [$title->text]);
}
# Close the file
close $fh;

Explanation:

• Text::CSV is a simple Perl module for reading and writing CSV files.
• The above code saves the scraped titles in a CSV file with a header.

Conclusion

Web scraping in Perl remains a powerful and effective tool in 2025. By using the right modules like LWP::UserAgent, HTML::Parser, and Mojo::DOM, you can easily extract data from websites. Whether you need to scrape static HTML or dynamic content, Perl provides solutions. With the right techniques and ethical practices, web scraping can be an invaluable skill for gathering data from the web.