Open URI & web scraping. Part II

[Jean Nibee]

Hi

(short form of a post I made yesterday that got no love, I suspect it'
sbecuase I was long winded)

Nutshell if I use open URI (and Hpricot) to download a web page and
'scrape' all the images to write them to my local disk dynamic images
always have improper format (Size 0) but static images are fine.

Example would be : <img
src="http://myserver:8080/Someservlet?name=blah&param=value&etc=etc">

Whether I copy/paste this URL in another browser or use open URI to
"get" the image I get an an error of:

XML Parsing Error: no element found
Location: http://myserver:8080/Someservlet?name=blah&param=value&etc=etc
Line Number 1, Column 1:

BUT, this image is displayed PERFECTLY in the html.

How can I get this image to download? (I suspect it's the mime type
being set on the server side but I am not 100% sure)

***
OUTPUT
***
[[URI information...]]
Fetched document:
http://myserver:8080/Someservlet?name=blah&param=value&etc=etc
Content Type: application/voicexml+xml
Charset:
Content-Encoding:
Last Modified:
IMAGE INFO!!! ->
Writing to file ::
D:\sandbox\auto_attendant\archive_reports\trunk\dumps\1194882652_854.gif

Thanks for your help.

 

[Axel Etzold]

-------- Original-Nachricht --------

Datum: Tue, 13 Nov 2007 22:21:14 +0900
Von: Jean Nibee <[email protected]>
An: (e-mail address removed)
Betreff: Open URI & web scraping. Part II

Hi

(short form of a post I made yesterday that got no love, I suspect it'
sbecuase I was long winded)

Nutshell if I use open URI (and Hpricot) to download a web page and
'scrape' all the images to write them to my local disk dynamic images
always have improper format (Size 0) but static images are fine.

Example would be : <img
src="http://myserver:8080/Someservlet?name=blah&param=value&etc=etc">

Whether I copy/paste this URL in another browser or use open URI to
"get" the image I get an an error of:

XML Parsing Error: no element found
Location: http://myserver:8080/Someservlet?name=blah&param=value&etc=etc
Line Number 1, Column 1:

BUT, this image is displayed PERFECTLY in the html.

How can I get this image to download? (I suspect it's the mime type
being set on the server side but I am not 100% sure)

***
OUTPUT
***
[[URI information...]]
Fetched document:
http://myserver:8080/Someservlet?name=blah&param=value&etc=etc
Content Type: application/voicexml+xml
Charset:
Content-Encoding:
Last Modified:
IMAGE INFO!!! ->
Writing to file ::
D:\sandbox\auto_attendant\archive_reports\trunk\dumps\1194882652_854.gif

Thanks for your help.

Dear Jean,

maybe you can use ruby's rio (http://rio.rubyforge.org/) to download
an entire website. I'm thinking in particular of the examples
given in
http://rio.rubyforge.org/classes/RIO/Doc/INTRO.html under the
headers

"Creating a Rio that refers to a web page" and
"Creating a Rio that refers to a file or directory on a FTP server".

Otherwise, maybe you get better responses on the Rails mailing list ?

Best regards,

Axel

 

[Jean Nibee]

Dear Jean,

maybe you can use ruby's rio (http://rio.rubyforge.org/) to download
an entire website. I'm thinking in particular of the examples
given in
http://rio.rubyforge.org/classes/RIO/Doc/INTRO.html under the
headers

"Creating a Rio that refers to a web page" and
"Creating a Rio that refers to a file or directory on a FTP server".

Otherwise, maybe you get better responses on the Rails mailing list ?

Best regards,

Axel

Same issue with RIO (albeit a little more complex to get thae page and
parse it as I"m doing w/ OpenURI / HPricot.)

I didn't post to rails since this isn't using the rails framework, but,
maybe they do more web work that it will clue them into an issue I'm
missing.

Thanks for your reply and help!

 

[Peter Szinek]

Hi Jean,

Same issue with RIO (albeit a little more complex to get thae page and
parse it as I"m doing w/ OpenURI / HPricot.)

What does an aggressive wget (i.e. with grab everything options) do?

Cheers,
Peter
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