Hello,
I’m looking for a screen scraper that will extract text contents off
html pages and save the text into files. I have looked at Mechanize and
Rubyful_Soup, but they are a bit over my head to modify to save just
the text contents to a file. (I’m a researcher trying to use Ruby for
real world text analysis tasks, and trying to learn Ruby at the same
time.) The levels of usage I’d love to have (choosey beggar):
program prompts me for url address to scrape and file name to save texts into,
or edit program to enter url address and file name
Of course a program that, given a url, would walk down the links, open
the pages, and save the text contents to a file would be … that would
be a commercial product. Is there one?
Thanks!
basi
you might get away with just using curl:
curl www.apple.com > mytextfile
or wget, which is capable of acting recursively on an entire site.
http://www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/wget/wget_14.html
On 06/12/05, basi [email protected] wrote:
or edit program to enter url address and file name
Of course a program that, given a url, would walk down the links, open
the pages, and save the text contents to a file would be … that would
be a commercial product. Is there one?
Thanks!
basi
try this:
$ w3m -dump www.ruby-lang.org
cheers,
Brian
–
http://ruby.brian-schroeder.de/
Stringed instrument chords: http://chordlist.brian-schroeder.de/
basi wrote:
Of course a program that, given a url, would walk down the links, open
the pages, and save the text contents to a file would be … that would
be a commercial product. Is there one?
No need for a commercial product. wget does all that.
basi wrote:
or edit program to enter url address and file name
Of course a program that, given a url, would walk down the links, open
the pages, and save the text contents to a file would be … that would
be a commercial product. Is there one?
Thanks!
basi
i think open-uri and Rubyful_soup are pretty straightforward. I like
this shows open-uri vs. Net::HTTP:
There’s commercial website downloaders that will follow every link in
every page, hit the server hundreds of times in a few seconds and get
your IP blacklisted pretty quickly (so run them from Starbuck’s
wireless). Look in Oreilly Spidering Hacks, for the right way to do
it. the (perl) examples are straightforward.
Hi,
Thanks for the info on wget and curl. Both are powerful page
downloaders. The downloaded pages are still “tagged”. I need to find a
way to “run” the pages and capture only the text display.
Thanks again.
basi
Can’t find a w3m binaries for windows xp. I’ll continue to look.
Thanks,
basi
Hello,
Can’t find windows xp binaries of w3m, snarf, also tried cUrl, wget,
but lynx does look like it renders the page close to what I’m looking
for.
Thanks to all who responded!
basi
On 12/6/05, basi [email protected] wrote:
Hi,
Thanks for the info on wget and curl. Both are powerful page
downloaders. The downloaded pages are still “tagged”. I need to find a
way to “run” the pages and capture only the text display.
$ lynx -dump www.rubystuff.com
Ruby Stuff. The Ruby Store for Ruby programmers.
Got the Right Stuff?
The Ruby Stuff store is one-stop shopping for assorted Ruby hacker
goodness.
T-shirts, hats, coffee mugs, clocks, mouse pads, and more.
Shirts
Ruby Stuff offers a nifty variety of stunning T-shirts and jerseys
for
men and women. You’ll feel naked without one.
[1]More …
Coffee Mugs
Hackers + caffeine = max coding pleasure. Drink your beverage of
choice from one of these mugs.
[2]More …
RubyStuff now has Stamps!
These first-class U. S. postage stamps won’t make the mail go any
faster, but they are sure to raise an eyebrow.
[3]More …
Stuff
There’s yet more Ruby stuff: Knock-out clocks; mighty mouse pads,
handsome hats.
[4]Mouse pads, [5]bags, [6]undies, [7]hats, [8]buttons, [9]more
[10]About RubyStuff.com …
References
- http://www.rubystuff.com/shirts.html
- http://www.rubystuff.com/mugs.html
- http://www.rubystuff.com/stamps.html
- http://www.rubystuff.com/mousepads.html
- http://www.rubystuff.com/bags.html
- http://www.rubystuff.com/undies.html
- http://www.rubystuff.com/hats.html
- http://www.rubystuff.com/buttons_and_magnets.html
- http://www.rubystuff.com/assorted.html
- http://www.rubystuff.com/about.html
Steve C. [email protected] wrote:
I will throw something like this together in Ruby over
the next days when I get some time and post it on
RubyForge. I have already done this sort of stuff in
Java and the concepts just really need a port.All we
are looking at Basi’s initial level of requirements is
to send an HTTP get, and pipe the response to a file.
Nope, according to the OP’s requirements, you also need to render the
html and spit out the rendered version as text, which makes lynx --dump
the right tool for the job. It’d be quite a big task to duplicate this
in ruby, I think.
martin
— Martin DeMello [email protected] wrote:
to send an HTTP get, and pipe the response to a
martin
By rendering the html, my interpretation of this was
that it is merely a question of stripping tags etc,
which can quickly be accomplished with gsub. Or am I
missing something?
rgds
Steve
Yahoo! DSL ? Something to write home about.
Just $16.99/mo. or less.
dsl.yahoo.com
On 07/12/05, Steve C. [email protected] wrote:
Java and the concepts just really need a port.All
the right tool for the job. It’d be quite a big task
missing something?
rgds
Steve
E.g. Tables and frames. So better use links2 or w3m for the task.
cheers,
Brian
–
http://ruby.brian-schroeder.de/
Stringed instrument chords: http://chordlist.brian-schroeder.de/
I will throw something like this together in Ruby over
the next days when I get some time and post it on
RubyForge. I have already done this sort of stuff in
Java and the concepts just really need a port.All we
are looking at Basi’s initial level of requirements is
to send an HTTP get, and pipe the response to a file.
Link following is a little more tricky since you need
to parse the HTML, issue a get, pipe the file, rinse
and repeat, but again not exactly rocket science.
rgds
Steve
— basi [email protected] wrote:
Yahoo! DSL ? Something to write home about.
Just $16.99/mo. or less.
dsl.yahoo.com
Steve C. [email protected] wrote:
By rendering the html, my interpretation of this was
that it is merely a question of stripping tags etc,
which can quickly be accomplished with gsub. Or am I
missing something?
Even without things like tables, the significance of various whitespace
elements (space, tab, newline) in html is very different from its
significance in the rendered page. e.g. the following can’t be done by
just stripping tags:
martin
Ah, yeah, forgot all about those nasty little things.
Not insuperable but would certainly add an overhead to
handle them effectively.
Steve
— Brian Schröder [email protected] wrote:
over
to send an HTTP get, and pipe the response to
to duplicate this
which can quickly be accomplished with gsub. Or am
http://chordlist.brian-schroeder.de/
Yahoo! DSL ? Something to write home about.
Just $16.99/mo. or less.
dsl.yahoo.com
WWW::Mechanize can do most of what is needed, except for the dumping
of the HTML as text. As others have said, what we really need is some
kind of HTML to text renderer. There has got to be gobs of C or C++
code out there that does this…how hard would it be to make a Ruby C
extension for this? Hash anyone ever thought about making a nice Ruby
extension for Gecko or even the HTML renderers in lynx or w3m?
Ryan