How to know if Perl Mojo::DOM::find returns or matches any DOM Element

Am currently parsing a series of webpages with Mojo::DOM and the only criterion for me to proceed down the web page is if there's an element found within.

I have my DOM object built like this:

my $urlMJ = Mojo::URL->new($entry->link);
my $tx = $ua->get($urlMJ);
my $base = $tx->req->url;
my $dom = $tx->res->dom;
my $divVideo = $dom->find('div#searchforme');

My question is, how do I know if $divVideo is empty?

I realise that from this question on google groups and grokbase answered by SRI (Riedel), if find doesn't match any element, it returns (if I get it correctly) the DOM object collection initiating the find and an empty DOM collection, which happens to be the result.

I thought of using an each to get to the empty DOM collection within, but won't the DOM returned contain the initial DOM structure?

I have tried using if (defined($divVideo)) , I also tried dumping with print Dumper($divVideo). All it returned was $VAR1 = bless( [], 'Mojo::Collection' );

I tried $dom->find('div#searchforme')->size , return values was 0 and even for those web pages that didn't fall into this category.

Can somebody please help me out?

Is my approach to this wrong?

Solution

if find doesn't match any element, it returns (if I get it correctly) the DOM object collection initiating the find and an empty DOM collection, which happens to be the result.

You're misunderstanding find. It returns just a Mojo::Collection of Mojo::DOM objects that represent each matching element in the page. Nothing else. So if no matches are found, just an empty collection is returned

This object has a size method, so you can say

my $divColln = $dom->find('div#searchforme');

if ( $divColln->size > 0 ) {
    ...
}

Alternatively you could use the each method to convert the collection into a list, and assign it to an array like this

my @divColln = $dom->find('div#searchforme')->each;

if ( @divColln ) {
    ...
}

Or if you are expecting to find just one such element (which it looks like you're doing here) then you can just pick the first item from the collection, like this

my $divVideo = $dom->find('div#searchforme')->[0];

if ( $divVideo ) {
    ...
}