Pulling text from list items using WWW::Mechanize::Firefox

Question

Given the following HTML:

<div class="chosen-drop">
  <ul class="chosen-results">
    <li>Stuff 1</li>
    <li>Stuff 2</li>
    <li>Stuff 3</li>
  </ul>
</div>

How do I pull the text from the list items using WWW::Mechanize::Firefox xpath function?

It seems like this should work, it's basically pulled from the documentation but it's coming up empty:

 my @text = $mech->xpath('//div[@class="chosen-drop"]/ul/li/text()');

I must be missing something with the xpath.

Answer 1

With these files:

mech_xpath.pl:

#!perl -w
use strict;
use WWW::Mechanize::Firefox;
use Data::Dump qw/dump/;

my $mech = WWW::Mechanize::Firefox->new();
$mech->get_local('local.html');

my @text = $mech->xpath('//div[@class="chosen-drop"]/ul/li/text()');
warn dump \@text;

<>;

local.html:

<div class="chosen-drop">
  <ul class="chosen-results">
    <li>Stuff 1</li>
    <li>Stuff 2</li>
    <li>Stuff 3</li>
  </ul>
</div>

Gives this output:

[
  bless({
    # tied MozRepl::RemoteObject::TiedHash
  }, "MozRepl::RemoteObject::Instance"),
  bless({
    # tied MozRepl::RemoteObject::TiedHash
  }, "MozRepl::RemoteObject::Instance"),
  bless({
    # tied MozRepl::RemoteObject::TiedHash
  }, "MozRepl::RemoteObject::Instance"),
]

So everything looks to be working. How are you checking the contents of @text?