Challenge: Extract episode descriptions.

[Stedwick]

This is just a whimsical question, really. I've been working on a
website where people can vote on episodes of TV shows (and I happen to
be a big Star Trek fan, so I'm starting there ha ha). By the way, the
website is, literally, 40 lines of code. I'm loving Ruby on Rails so
far.

http://brocoum.com/voter/startrekvoyager/episodes

Anyway, I need to extract the episode descriptions for the tool tips,
and the descriptions come from TV.com. Unfortunately, this has turned
out to be rather harder than it looks!

http://www.tv.com/star-trek-deep-sp....html?season=0&tag=season_dropdown;dropdown;7

If any of you feel up to the challenge, see if you can streamline my
code below, or write better code yourself. I can't help but think that
there's an easier way to do this!

# open html file
f = File.read("episode_guide.html")

# keep track of the number of descriptions found
count = 0

# each description is enclosed in a multiline <p> </p> tag
f.scan(/<p>.*?<\/p>/m) do |match|
# start with a blank description
desc = ''
# i want to condense each desc into a single line, and remove the
stardate info
match.each_line {|m|
# remove stardate...<br /> because the stardate is not always on
its own line
m.sub!(/^.*<br \/>/,'')
# remove unnecessary whitespace from beginning
m.sub!(/^\s*/,'')
# add non-stardate and non-blank lines to the desc and remove
trailing \n
desc += m.chomp unless m =~ /stardate:/i or !(m =~ /\w/)
}

# remove html tags
desc.gsub!(/<.*?>/,'')
# fix periods ie. "Hi there.I love you." => "Hi there. I love you."
# these period problems were caused by concatenating the paragraphs
above into one line
desc.gsub!(/(\w\.)(\w)/,'\1 \2')
# fix stupid html &nbsp; type stuff
desc.gsub!(/&nbsp;/," ")
desc.gsub!(/'/,"'")
# make all spaces single
desc.gsub!(/ {2,}/,' ')

# output finished description followed by blank line and increment
counter
puts desc + "\n\n"
count += 1
end

# make sure i got all 176 episode descriptions
puts count

Philip

 

[yermej]

This is just a whimsical question, really. I've been working on a
website where people can vote on episodes of TV shows (and I happen to
be a big Star Trek fan, so I'm starting there ha ha). By the way, the
website is, literally, 40 lines of code. I'm loving Ruby on Rails so
far.

http://brocoum.com/voter/startrekvoyager/episodes

Anyway, I need to extract the episode descriptions for the tool tips,
and the descriptions come from TV.com. Unfortunately, this has turned
out to be rather harder than it looks!

http://www.tv.com/star-trek-deep-space-nine/show/166/episode_guide.ht...

If any of you feel up to the challenge, see if you can streamline my
code below, or write better code yourself. I can't help but think that
there's an easier way to do this!

# open html file
f = File.read("episode_guide.html")

# keep track of the number of descriptions found
count = 0

# each description is enclosed in a multiline <p> </p> tag
f.scan(/<p>.*?<\/p>/m) do |match|
# start with a blank description
desc = ''
# i want to condense each desc into a single line, and remove the
stardate info
match.each_line {|m|
# remove stardate...<br /> because the stardate is not always on
its own line
m.sub!(/^.*<br \/>/,'')
# remove unnecessary whitespace from beginning
m.sub!(/^\s*/,'')
# add non-stardate and non-blank lines to the desc and remove
trailing \n
desc += m.chomp unless m =~ /stardate:/i or !(m =~ /\w/)
}

# remove html tags
desc.gsub!(/<.*?>/,'')
# fix periods ie. "Hi there.I love you." => "Hi there. I love you."
# these period problems were caused by concatenating the paragraphs
above into one line
desc.gsub!(/(\w\.)(\w)/,'\1 \2')
# fix stupid html &nbsp; type stuff
desc.gsub!(/&nbsp;/," ")
desc.gsub!(/'/,"'")
# make all spaces single
desc.gsub!(/ {2,}/,' ')

# output finished description followed by blank line and increment
counter
puts desc + "\n\n"
count += 1
end

# make sure i got all 176 episode descriptions
puts count

Philip

Look into Hpricot - http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/hpricot/ - or
another HTML parser. It makes things like this much easier - no need
for regexes.

 

[Jean-François Trân]

If any of you feel up to the challenge, see if you can streamline my
code below, or write better code yourself. I can't help but think that
there's an easier way to do this!

# open html file
f =3D File.read("episode_guide.html")

# keep track of the number of descriptions found
count =3D 0

# each description is enclosed in a multiline <p> </p> tag
f.scan(/<p>.*?<\/p>/m) do |match|

[...]

You should take a look at Hpricot gem to make the
html scraping easier.

-- Jean-Fran=E7ois.

 

[lrlebron]

This is just a whimsical question, really. I've been working on a
website where people can vote on episodes of TV shows (and I happen to
be a big Star Trek fan, so I'm starting there ha ha). By the way, the
website is, literally, 40 lines of code. I'm loving Ruby on Rails so
far.

http://brocoum.com/voter/startrekvoyager/episodes

Anyway, I need to extract the episode descriptions for the tool tips,
and the descriptions come from TV.com. Unfortunately, this has turned
out to be rather harder than it looks!

http://www.tv.com/star-trek-deep-space-nine/show/166/episode_guide.ht...

If any of you feel up to the challenge, see if you can streamline my
code below, or write better code yourself. I can't help but think that
there's an easier way to do this!

# open html file
f = File.read("episode_guide.html")

# keep track of the number of descriptions found
count = 0

# each description is enclosed in a multiline <p> </p> tag
f.scan(/<p>.*?<\/p>/m) do |match|
# start with a blank description
desc = ''
# i want to condense each desc into a single line, and remove the
stardate info
match.each_line {|m|
# remove stardate...<br /> because the stardate is not always on
its own line
m.sub!(/^.*<br \/>/,'')
# remove unnecessary whitespace from beginning
m.sub!(/^\s*/,'')
# add non-stardate and non-blank lines to the desc and remove
trailing \n
desc += m.chomp unless m =~ /stardate:/i or !(m =~ /\w/)
}

# remove html tags
desc.gsub!(/<.*?>/,'')
# fix periods ie. "Hi there.I love you." => "Hi there. I love you."
# these period problems were caused by concatenating the paragraphs
above into one line
desc.gsub!(/(\w\.)(\w)/,'\1 \2')
# fix stupid html &nbsp; type stuff
desc.gsub!(/&nbsp;/," ")
desc.gsub!(/'/,"'")
# make all spaces single
desc.gsub!(/ {2,}/,' ')

# output finished description followed by blank line and increment
counter
puts desc + "\n\n"
count += 1
end

# make sure i got all 176 episode descriptions
puts count

Philip

This is not exactly what you want. But you may find it helpful

require 'hpricot'
require 'open-uri'

url ='http://www.tv.com/star-trek-deep-space-nine/show/166/
episode_guide.html?printable=1'
@Doc =Hpricot(open(url))

@doc.search("/html/body/div[1]/div").each do |div|

div.search("h1/a") do |h1|
puts h1.inner_text.strip().squeeze(" ").gsub("\n"," ")
end

div.search("//div[@class='f-verdana f-small lh-16 mt-15 mb-15']") do
|div|
puts div.inner_text.strip().squeeze(" ").gsub("\n"," ")
puts
end

end

 

[William James]

This is just a whimsical question, really. I've been working on a
website where people can vote on episodes of TV shows (and I happen to
be a big Star Trek fan, so I'm starting there ha ha). By the way, the
website is, literally, 40 lines of code. I'm loving Ruby on Rails so
far.

http://brocoum.com/voter/startrekvoyager/episodes

Anyway, I need to extract the episode descriptions for the tool tips,
and the descriptions come from TV.com. Unfortunately, this has turned
out to be rather harder than it looks!

http://www.tv.com/star-trek-deep-sp....html?season=0&tag=season_dropdown;dropdown;7

If any of you feel up to the challenge, see if you can streamline my
code below, or write better code yourself. I can't help but think that
there's an easier way to do this!

# open html file
f = File.read("episode_guide.html")

# keep track of the number of descriptions found
count = 0

# each description is enclosed in a multiline <p> </p> tag
f.scan(/<p>.*?<\/p>/m) do |match|
# start with a blank description
desc = ''
# i want to condense each desc into a single line, and remove the
stardate info
match.each_line {|m|
# remove stardate...<br /> because the stardate is not always on
its own line
m.sub!(/^.*<br \/>/,'')
# remove unnecessary whitespace from beginning
m.sub!(/^\s*/,'')
# add non-stardate and non-blank lines to the desc and remove
trailing \n
desc += m.chomp unless m =~ /stardate:/i or !(m =~ /\w/)
}

# remove html tags
desc.gsub!(/<.*?>/,'')
# fix periods ie. "Hi there.I love you." => "Hi there. I love you."
# these period problems were caused by concatenating the paragraphs
above into one line
desc.gsub!(/(\w\.)(\w)/,'\1 \2')
# fix stupid html &nbsp; type stuff
desc.gsub!(/&nbsp;/," ")
desc.gsub!(/'/,"'")
# make all spaces single
desc.gsub!(/ {2,}/,' ')

# output finished description followed by blank line and increment
counter
puts desc + "\n\n"
count += 1
end

# make sure i got all 176 episode descriptions
puts count

Philip

text = IO.read("episode_guide.html")
a = text.scan(/<p>\s*stardate:[ a-z.\d]*(.*?)<\/p>/mi).flatten.
map{|s|
s.strip.gsub(/&nbsp;/," ").gsub(/<.*?>|&[^;]+;/m,"").
gsub(/\s+/, " ") }
puts a.join("\n\n")
puts
puts a.size

 

[William James]

text = IO.read("episode_guide.html")
a = text.scan(/<p>\s*stardate:[ a-z.\d]*(.*?)<\/p>/mi).flatten.
map{|s|
s.strip.gsub(/ /," ").gsub(/<.*?>|&[^;]+;/m,"").
gsub(/\s+/, " ") }
puts a.join("\n\n")
puts
puts a.size

Corrected:

text = IO.read("episode_guide.html")
a = text.scan(/<p>\s*stardate:[ a-z.\d]*(.*?)<\/p>/mi).flatten.
map{|s|
s.gsub(/&nbsp;/," ").gsub(/<.*?>/m,"").gsub("'","'").
gsub(/\s+/, " ").strip }
puts a.join("\n\n")
puts
puts a.size

 

[Stedwick]

text = IO.read("episode_guide.html")
a = text.scan(/<p>\s*stardate:[ a-z.\d]*(.*?)<\/p>/mi).flatten.
map{|s|
s.strip.gsub(/ /," ").gsub(/<.*?>|&[^;]+;/m,"").
gsub(/\s+/, " ") }
puts a.join("\n\n")
puts
puts a.size

Corrected:

text = IO.read("episode_guide.html")
a = text.scan(/<p>\s*stardate:[ a-z.\d]*(.*?)<\/p>/mi).flatten.
map{|s|
s.gsub(/ /," ").gsub(/<.*?>/m,"").gsub("'","'").
gsub(/\s+/, " ").strip }
puts a.join("\n\n")
puts
puts a.size

I'm liking yours so far William It's pretty elegant.