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=cut

sub urldec {
  my $str=shift;
  $str=~s/\+/ /gs;
  $str=~s/%([a-f\d]{2})/pack("C", hex($1))/egi;
  return $str;
}

=head2 ht2t

C<ht2t> is short for I<html-table to table>.

This sub extracts an html-C<< <table> >>s and returns its C<< <tr>s >>
and C<< <td>s >> as an array of arrayrefs. And strips away any html
inside the C<< <td>s >> as well.

 my @table = ht2t($html,'some string occuring before the <table> you want');

Input: One or two arguments.

First argument: the html where a C<< <table> >> is to be found and converted.

Second argument: (optional) If the html contains more than one C<<
<table> >>, and you do not want the first one, applying a second
argument is a way of telling C<ht2t> which to capture: the one with this word
or string occurring before it.

Output: An array of arrayrefs.

C<ht2t()> is a quick and dirty way of scraping (or harvesting as it is
also called) data from a web page. Look too L<HTML::Parse> to do this
more accurate.

Example:

 use Acme::Tools;
 use LWP::Simple;
 my $url = "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population";
 for( ht2t( get($url), "Countries" ) ) {
   my($rank, $country, $pop) = @$_;
   $pop =~ s/,//g;
   printf "%3d | %-32s | %9d\n", @$_ if $pop>0;
 }

Output:

  1 | China                            | 1367740000
  2 | India                            | 1262090000
  3 | United States                    | 319043000
  4 | Indonesia                        | 252164800
  5 | Brazil                           | 203404000

...and so on.

=cut

sub ht2t {
  my($f,$s,$r)=@_; 1>@_||@_>3 and croak; $s='' if @_==1;
  $f=~s,.*?($s).*?(<table.*?)</table.*,$2,si;
  my $e=0;$e++ while index($f,$s=chr($e))>=$[;
  $f=~s/<t(d|r|h).*?>/\l$1$s/gsi;
  $f=~s/\s*<.*?>\s*/ /gsi;
  my @t=split("r$s",$f);shift @t;
  $r||=sub{s/&(#160|nbsp);/ /g;s/&amp;/&/g;s/^\s*(.*?)\s*$/$1/s;
	   s/(\d) (\d)/$1$2/g if /^[\d \.\,]+$/};
  for(@t){my @r=split/[dh]$s/;shift@r;$_=[map{&$r;$_}@r]}
  @t;
}

=head1 FILES, DIRECTORIES

=head2 writefile

Justification:

Perl needs three or four operations to make a file out of a string:

 open my $FILE, '>', $filename  or die $!;
 print $FILE $text;
 close($FILE);

This is way simpler:

 writefile($filename,$text);

Sub writefile opens the file i binary mode (C<binmode()>) and has two usage modes:

B<Input:> Two arguments

B<First argument> is the filename. If the file exists, its overwritten.
If the file can not be opened for writing, a die (a croak really) happens.

B<Second input argument> is one of:

=over 4

=item * Either a scaler. That is a normal string to be written to the file.

=item * Or a reference to a scalar. That referred text is written to the file.

=item * Or a reference to an array of scalars. This array is the written to the
 file element by element and C<< \n >> is automatically appended to each element.

=back

Alternativelly, you can write several files at once.

Example, this:

 writefile('file1.txt','The text....tjo');
 writefile('file2.txt','The text....hip');
 writefile('file3.txt','The text....and hop');

...is the same as this:

 writefile([
   ['file1.txt','The text....tjo'],
   ['file2.txt','The text....hip'],
   ['file3.txt','The text....and hop'],
 ]);