WGETting from within rails

Rails
1

i’m writing an app that wants to fetch a URL from a remote server and
return the html text file to the app. i’ve been told there are some
xml parsers for perl that have request functionality built right in.
is there such a thing for Ruby or if nothing else the possibility of
using WGET from within a Ruby program.

thanks in advance for any help.

2

On May 12, 11:37 am, plewizard [email protected]
wrote:

i’m writing an app that wants to fetch a URL from a remote server and
return the html text file to the app. i’ve been told there are some
xml parsers for perl that have request functionality built right in.
is there such a thing for Ruby or if nothing else the possibility of
using WGET from within a Ruby program.

thanks in advance for any help.

you probably want #read in open-uri (or Net::HTTP)
http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/open-uri/rdoc/index.html

or you could just backtick:
curl http::/yourURLhere

3

plewizard,

i’m writing an app that wants to fetch a URL from a remote server
and
return the html text file to the app. i’ve been told there are some

If you just want to fetch the page text :

require ‘open-uri’;
html = open(“http://yahoo.com”).readlines

puts html

If you need to extract part(s) of the page, use Hpricot

require 'rubygems';
require 'open-uri'
require 'hpricot'

doc    = Hpricot(open("http://yahoo.com"))

title  = doc.search('title').text
body   = doc.search('body' ).text
links  = doc .search("a").collect{|a| a['href'] }

puts title
puts body
puts links.to_yaml

Hpricot also lets you modify the page contents :
f.ex,
doc.search(‘a’).each{|link| link.swap(link.inner_html)}

turns all the
something
into
something

Alain R.

http://blog.ravet.com