Screen scraping an html text contents into a file

[basi]

Hello,

I'm looking for a screen scraper that will extract text contents off
html pages and save the text into files. I have looked at Mechanize and
Rubyful_Soup, but they are a bit over my head to modify to save just
the text contents to a file. (I'm a researcher trying to use Ruby for
real world text analysis tasks, and trying to learn Ruby at the same
time.) The levels of usage I'd love to have (choosey beggar):

program prompts me for url address to scrape and file name to save texts into,
or edit program to enter url address and file name

Of course a program that, given a url, would walk down the links, open
the pages, and save the text contents to a file would be ... that would
be a commercial product. Is there one?

Thanks!
basi

 

[Lou Vanek]

you might get away with just using curl:

curl www.apple.com > mytextfile

or wget, which is capable of acting recursively on an entire site.
http://www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/wget/wget_14.html

 

[Gene Tani]

Hello,

I'm looking for a screen scraper that will extract text contents off
html pages and save the text into files. I have looked at Mechanize and
Rubyful_Soup, but they are a bit over my head to modify to save just
the text contents to a file. (I'm a researcher trying to use Ruby for
real world text analysis tasks, and trying to learn Ruby at the same
time.) The levels of usage I'd love to have (choosey beggar):


Of course a program that, given a url, would walk down the links, open
the pages, and save the text contents to a file would be ... that would
be a commercial product. Is there one?

Thanks!
basi

i think open-uri and Rubyful_soup are pretty straightforward. I like
this shows open-uri vs. Net::HTTP:
http://www.zenspider.com/dl/rubyconf2005/open-uri.pdf

There's commercial website downloaders that will follow every link in
every page, hit the server hundreds of times in a few seconds and get
your IP blacklisted pretty quickly (so run them from Starbuck's
wireless). Look in Oreilly Spidering Hacks, for the right way to do
it. the (perl) examples are straightforward.

 

[Brian Schröder]

Hello,

I'm looking for a screen scraper that will extract text contents off
html pages and save the text into files. I have looked at Mechanize and
Rubyful_Soup, but they are a bit over my head to modify to save just
the text contents to a file. (I'm a researcher trying to use Ruby for
real world text analysis tasks, and trying to learn Ruby at the same
time.) The levels of usage I'd love to have (choosey beggar):


Of course a program that, given a url, would walk down the links, open
the pages, and save the text contents to a file would be ... that would
be a commercial product. Is there one?

Thanks!
basi

try this:

$ w3m -dump www.ruby-lang.org

cheers,

Brian

 

[Edward Faulkner]

--5I6of5zJg18YgZEa
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: inline

No need for a commercial product. wget does all that.

--5I6of5zJg18YgZEa
Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name="signature.asc"
Content-Description: Digital signature
Content-Disposition: inline

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFDlgAtnhUz11p9MSARArLwAJ0d//D+GwK8jlzShAJWv6wS6SZa2QCffIe1
6MNwVCyZkzJ0ORrV+1EyKlU=
=fBPk
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

--5I6of5zJg18YgZEa--

 

[basi]

Hi,
Thanks for the info on wget and curl. Both are powerful page
downloaders. The downloaded pages are still "tagged". I need to find a
way to "run" the pages and capture only the text display.
Thanks again.
basi

 

[Joe Van Dyk]

Hi,
Thanks for the info on wget and curl. Both are powerful page
downloaders. The downloaded pages are still "tagged". I need to find a
way to "run" the pages and capture only the text display.

$ lynx -dump www.rubystuff.com

Ruby Stuff. The Ruby Store for Ruby programmers.

Got the Right Stuff?

The Ruby Stuff store is one-stop shopping for assorted Ruby hacker
goodness.

T-shirts, hats, coffee mugs, clocks, mouse pads, and more.

Shirts

Ruby Stuff offers a nifty variety of stunning T-shirts and jerseys for
men and women. You'll feel naked without one.

[1]More ...

Coffee Mugs

Hackers + caffeine =3D max coding pleasure. Drink your beverage of
choice from one of these mugs.

[2]More ...

RubyStuff now has Stamps!

These first-class U. S. postage stamps won't make the mail go any
faster, but they are sure to raise an eyebrow.

[3]More ...

Stuff

There's yet more Ruby stuff: Knock-out clocks; mighty mouse pads,
handsome hats.

[4]Mouse pads, [5]bags, [6]undies, [7]hats, [8]buttons, [9]more

[10]About RubyStuff.com ...

References

1. http://www.rubystuff.com/shirts.html
2. http://www.rubystuff.com/mugs.html
3. http://www.rubystuff.com/stamps.html
4. http://www.rubystuff.com/mousepads.html
5. http://www.rubystuff.com/bags.html
6. http://www.rubystuff.com/undies.html
7. http://www.rubystuff.com/hats.html
8. http://www.rubystuff.com/buttons_and_magnets.html
9. http://www.rubystuff.com/assorted.html
10. http://www.rubystuff.com/about.html

 

[basi]

Can't find a w3m binaries for windows xp. I'll continue to look.
Thanks,
basi

 

[basi]

Hello,
Can't find windows xp binaries of w3m, snarf, also tried cUrl, wget,
but lynx does look like it renders the page close to what I'm looking
for.
Thanks to all who responded!
basi

 

[Steve Callaway]

I will throw something like this together in Ruby over
the next days when I get some time and post it on
RubyForge. I have already done this sort of stuff in
Java and the concepts just really need a port.All we
are looking at Basi's initial level of requirements is
to send an HTTP get, and pipe the response to a file.

Link following is a little more tricky since you need
to parse the HTML, issue a get, pipe the file, rinse
and repeat, but again not exactly rocket science.

rgds

Steve

Hello,
Can't find windows xp binaries of w3m, snarf, also
tried cUrl, wget,
but lynx does look like it renders the page close to
what I'm looking
for.=20
Thanks to all who responded!
basi
=20
=20
=20

=09
__________________________________________=20
Yahoo! DSL =96 Something to write home about.=20
Just $16.99/mo. or less.=20
dsl.yahoo.com=20

 

[Martin DeMello]

I will throw something like this together in Ruby over
the next days when I get some time and post it on
RubyForge. I have already done this sort of stuff in
Java and the concepts just really need a port.All we
are looking at Basi's initial level of requirements is
to send an HTTP get, and pipe the response to a file.

Nope, according to the OP's requirements, you also need to render the
html and spit out the rendered version as text, which makes lynx --dump
the right tool for the job. It'd be quite a big task to duplicate this
in ruby, I think.

martin

 

[Steve Callaway]

file.
=20
Nope, according to the OP's requirements, you also
need to render the
html and spit out the rendered version as text,
which makes lynx --dump
the right tool for the job. It'd be quite a big task
to duplicate this
in ruby, I think.
=20
martin
=20
=20

By rendering the html, my interpretation of this was
that it is merely a question of stripping tags etc,
which can quickly be accomplished with gsub. Or am I
missing something?

rgds

Steve


=09
__________________________________________=20
Yahoo! DSL =96 Something to write home about.=20
Just $16.99/mo. or less.=20
dsl.yahoo.com=20

 

[Brian Schröder]

By rendering the html, my interpretation of this was
that it is merely a question of stripping tags etc,
which can quickly be accomplished with gsub. Or am I
missing something?

rgds

Steve

E.g. Tables and frames. So better use links2 or w3m for the task.

cheers,

Brian

 

[Steve Callaway]

Ah, yeah, forgot all about those nasty little things.
Not insuperable but would certainly add an overhead to
handle them effectively.

Steve

=20
E.g. Tables and frames. So better use links2 or w3m
for the task.
=20
cheers,
=20
Brian
=20
=20
=20
--
http://ruby.brian-schroeder.de/
=20
Stringed instrument chords:
http://chordlist.brian-schroeder.de/
=20
=20

=09
__________________________________________=20
Yahoo! DSL =96 Something to write home about.=20
Just $16.99/mo. or less.=20
dsl.yahoo.com=20

 

[Martin DeMello]

By rendering the html, my interpretation of this was
that it is merely a question of stripping tags etc,
which can quickly be accomplished with gsub. Or am I
missing something?

Even without things like tables, the significance of various whitespace
elements (space, tab, newline) in html is very different from its
significance in the rendered page. e.g. the following can't be done by
just stripping tags:

<ul><li>one
two</li><li>three<li>four</ul>

martin

 

[Ryan Leavengood]

WWW::Mechanize can do most of what is needed, except for the dumping
of the HTML as text. As others have said, what we really need is some
kind of HTML to text renderer. There has got to be gobs of C or C++
code out there that does this...how hard would it be to make a Ruby C
extension for this? Hash anyone ever thought about making a nice Ruby
extension for Gecko or even the HTML renderers in lynx or w3m?

Ryan