# scRUBYt! - Hpricot and WWW::Mechanize on even more steroids, **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [March 26, 2007, 10:02am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/scrubyt-hpricot-and-www-mechanize-on-even-more-steroids/90132 "2007-03-26T10:02:35Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![splattael](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/858c86/32.png) [@splattael](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/splattael)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2007, 10:02am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/scrubyt-hpricot-and-www-mechanize-on-even-more-steroids/90132/1 "2007-03-26T10:02:35Z")
Hello all, scRUBYt! version 0.2.6 has been released with some great new features, tons of bugfixes and lot of changes overall which should greatly affect the reliability of the system. # ============ What’s this? scRUBYt! is a very easy to learn and use, yet powerful Web scraping framework based on Hpricot and mechanize. It’s purpose is to free you from the drudgery of web page crawling, looking up HTML tags, attributes, XPaths, form names and other typical low-level web scraping woes by figuring these out from your examples copy’n’pasted from the Web page. # =========== What’s new? A lot of long-awaited features have been added: most notably, automatic crawling to the detail pages, which was the most requested feature in scRUBYt!’s history ever. Another great addition is the improved example generation - you don’t have to use the whole text of the element you would like to match anymore - it is enough to specify a substring, and the first element that contains the string will be returned. Moreover, it is possible to create compound examples like this: flight :begins\_with =\> ‘Arrival’, :contains /\d{4}/, :ends\_with =\> ‘20:00’ The crawling through next links has been greatly improved - it is possible to use images as next links, to generate URLs instead of clicking on the next link, and a great deal of bugs (including the infamous google next link problem) have been fixed. An enormous amount of bugs were fixed and the whole system was tested thoroughly, so the overall reliability should be improved a lot as opposed to the previous releases. Something non-software related: 4 people have joined the development, so I guess there is much, much more to come in the future! # ========= CHANGELOG - [NEW] Automatically crawling to and extracting from detail pages - [NEW] Compound example specification: So far the example of a pattern had to be a string. Now it can be a hash as well, like {:contains =\> /\d\d-\d/, :begins\_with =\> ‘Telephone’} - [NEW] More sophisticated example specification: Possible to use regexp as well, and need not (but still possible of course) to specify the whole content of the node - nodes that contain the string/match the regexp will be returned, too - [NEW] Possibility to force writing text in case of non-leaf nodes - [NEW] Crawling to the next page now possible via image links as well - [NEW] Possibility to define examples for any pattern (before it did not make sense for ancestors) - [NEW] Implementation of crawling to the next page with different methods - [NEW] Heuristics: if something ends with \_url, it is a shortcut for: some\_url ‘href’, :type =\> :attribute - [FIX] Crawling to the next page (the broken google example): if the next link text is not an , traverse down until the is found; if it is still not found, traverse up until it is found - [FIX] Crawling to next pages does not break if the next link is greyed out (or otherwise present but has no href attribute (Credit: Robert Au) - [FIX] DRY-ed next link lookup - it should be much more robust now as it uses the ‘standard’ example lookup - [NEW] Correct exporting of detail page extractors - [NEW] Added more powerful XPath regexp (Credit: Karol Hosiawa) - [NEW] New examples for the new featutres - [FIX] Tons of bugfixes, new blackbox and unit tests, refactoring and stabilization # ============ Announcement On popular demand, there is a new forum to discuss everything scRUBYt! related: [http://agora.scrubyt.org](http://agora.scrubyt.org) You are welcome to sign up tell your opinion, ask for features, report bugs or discuss stuff - or to just look around what other’s are saying. # ================ Closing thoughts Please keep the feedback coming - your contributions are a key factor to scRUBYt!’s succes. This is not an exaggeration or a feeble attempt at flattery - since we (obviously) can not test everything on every possible page, we can make scRUBYt! truly powerful only if you send us all the quirks and problems you encounter during scraping, as well as your suggestions and ideas. Thanks everyone! Cheers, Peter \_\_ [http://www.rubyrailways.com](http://www.rubyrailways.com) :: Ruby and Web2.0 blog [http://scrubyt.org](http://scrubyt.org) :: Ruby web scraping framework [http://rubykitchensink.ca/](http://rubykitchensink.ca/) :: The indexed archive of all things Ruby. ---
**Author:** ![splattael](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/858c86/32.png) [@splattael](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/splattael)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2007, 11:36pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/scrubyt-hpricot-and-www-mechanize-on-even-more-steroids/90132/2 "2007-03-28T23:36:41Z")
Peter, Apologies for the brevity, on a blackberry. All but two of the unit tests are passing with firewatir. Can you confirm what the proxy and mechanize\_doc params are used for in the fetch method? Couldn’t find them used anywhere. Mind if I rename methods and variable away from being so mechanize specific? Hope to commit changes to my 3.0 tag tomorrow afternoon