Parsing Apache mod_status/Extended_Status page (with PERL…)

I spent some time, this afternoon, to reply a question of the ServerFault community, where Raptor asked:

“I enabled the Apache Status page by mod_status module. The process list is very long, and most of them are OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0, which I want to filter away. Is there any tweak, option or flag to hide those OPTIONS processes?”

Several years ago I had the chance to parse mod_status output as well and, at that time, I relyed on a particular option that, as far as I remember, was added to mod_status to easier the process of automatically-parsing mod_status output.

As you can see from my answer, things are a bit different, unfortunately.

Anyway, thanks to the magicness of PERL and the nice HTML::Extract module, a great solution cames out.

Feel free to check it directly on ServerFault!