Ruby can call external shell commands, right?

[Preston Crawford]

I'm trying to use it to scrape the URL for one of my favorite radio
shows (All Things Considered) since it isn't available to me in portable
format on Linux. I'd like to scrape the URL, parse the XML and as I
navigate the tree make external calls to mplayer, etc. Should this be
theoretically possible? Never done this with Ruby before.

Preston

 

[Ezra Zygmuntowicz]

Preston-
Yes you can do that a few different ways:
with backticks: `mplayer myfile.mp3`
or system: system("mplayer myfile.mp3")
or %x: %x{ mplayer myfile.mp3 }

HTH
-Ezra

I'm trying to use it to scrape the URL for one of my favorite radio
shows (All Things Considered) since it isn't available to me in
portable
format on Linux. I'd like to scrape the URL, parse the XML and as I
navigate the tree make external calls to mplayer, etc. Should this be
theoretically possible? Never done this with Ruby before.

Preston

-Ezra Zygmuntowicz
Yakima Herald-Republic
WebMaster
509-577-7732
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Charles Mills]

Preston-
Yes you can do that a few different ways:
with backticks: `mplayer myfile.mp3`
or system: system("mplayer myfile.mp3")
or %x: %x{ mplayer myfile.mp3 }

don't forget IO.popen and Process.new.

 

[Charles Mills]

don't forget IO.popen and Process.new.

nevermind about Process.new - Process is a module, but you may find it
useful.