How do I post/upload multiple files at once using HttpClient? - ruby

def test_post_with_file filename = 'test01.xml'
File.open(filename) do |file|
response = #http_client.post(url, {'documents'=>file})
end
end
How do I modify the above method to handle a multi-file-array post/upload?
file_array = ['test01.xml', 'test02.xml']

You mean like this?
def test_post_with_file(file_array=[])
file_array.each do |filename|
File.open(filename) do |file|
response = #http_client.post(url, {'documents'=>file})
end
end
end

I was having the same problem and finally figured out how to do it:
def test_post_with_file(file_array)
form = file_array.map { |n| ['documents[]', File.open(n)] }
response = #http_client.post(#url, form)
end
You can see in the docs how to pass multiple values: http://rubydoc.info/gems/httpclient/HTTPClient#post_content-instance_method .
In the "body" row, I tried without success to use the 4th example. Somehow HttpClient just decides to apply .to_s to each hash in the array.
Then I tried the 2nd solution and it wouldn't work either because only the last value is kept by the server. But I discovered after some tinkering that the second solution works if the parameter name includes the square brackets to indicate there are mutiple values as an array.
Maybe this is a bug in Sinatra (that's what I'm using), maybe the handling of such data is implementation-dependent, maybe the HttpClient doc is outdated/wrong. Or a combination of these.

Related

Looking for a cleaner way to scrape from website by avoiding repeating

Hi I am just doing a bit of refactoring on a small cli web scraping project I did in Ruby and I was simply wondering if there was cleaner way to write a particular section without repeating the code too much.
Basically with the code below, I pulled data from a website but I had to do this per page. You will notice that both methods are only different by their name and the source.
def self.scrape_first_page
html = open("https://www.texasblackpages.com/united-states/san-antonio")
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(html)
doc.css('div.grid_element').each do |business|
biz = Business.new
biz.name = business.css('a b').text
biz.type = business.css('span.hidden-xs').text
biz.number = business.css('span.sm-block.lmargin.sm-nomargin').text.gsub("\r\n","").strip
end
end
def self.scrape_second_page
html = open('https://www.texasblackpages.com/united-states/san-antonio?page=2')
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(html)
doc.css('div.grid_element').each do |business|
biz = Business.new
biz.name = business.css('a b').text
biz.type = business.css('span.hidden-xs').text
biz.number = business.css('span.sm-block.lmargin.sm-nomargin').text.gsub("\r\n","").strip
end
end
Is there a way for me to streamline this process all with just one method pulling from one source, but have the ability to access different pages within the same site, or this is pretty much the best and only way? They owners of the website do not have a public api from me to pull from in case anyone is wondering.
Remember that in programming you want to steer towards code that follows the Zero, One or Infinity Rule avoid the dreaded two. In other words, write methods that take no arguments, fixed arguments (one), or an array of unspecified size (infinity).
So the first step is to clean up the scraping function to make it as generic as possible:
def scrape(page)
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open(page))
# Use map here to return an array of Business objects
doc.css('div.grid_element').map do |business|
Business.new.tap do |biz|
# Use tap to modify this object before returning it
biz.name = business.css('a b').text
biz.type = business.css('span.hidden-xs').text
biz.number = business.css('span.sm-block.lmargin.sm-nomargin').text.gsub("\r\n","").strip
end
end
end
Note that apart from the extraction code, there's nothing specific about this. Takes a URL, returns Business objects in an Array.
In order to generate pages 1..N, consider this:
def pages(base_url, start: 1)
page = start
Enumerator.new do |y|
loop do
y << base_url % page
page += 1
end
end
end
Now that's an infinite series, but you can always cap it to whatever you want with take(n) or by instead looping until you get an empty list:
# Collect all business from each of the pages...
businesses = pages('https://www.texasblackpages.com/united-states/san-antonio?page=%d').lazy.map do |page|
# ...by scraping the page...
scrape(page)
end.take_while do |results|
# ...and iterating until there's no results, as in Array#any? is false.
results.any?
end.to_a.flatten
The .lazy part means "evaluate each part of the chain sequentially" as opposed to the default behaviour of trying to evaluate each stage to completion. This is important or else it will try and download an infinite number of pages before moving to the next test.
The .to_a on the end forces that chain to run to completion. The .flatten squishes all the page-wise results into a single result set.
Of course if you want to scrape the first N pages, it's a lot easier:
pages('https://www.texasblackpages.com/.../san-antonio?page=%d').take(n).flat_map do |page|
scrape(page)
end
It's almost no code!
This was suggested by #Todd A. Jacobs
def self.scrape(url)
html = open(url)
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(html)
doc.css('div.grid_element').each do |business|
biz = Business.new
biz.name = business.css('a b').text
biz.type = business.css('span.hidden-xs').text
biz.number = business.css('span.sm-block.lmargin.sm-nomargin').text.gsub("\r\n","").strip
end
The downside is with there not being a public api I had to invoke the method as many times as I need it since the url's are representing different pages within the wbesite, but this is fine because I was able to get rid of the repeating methods.
def make_listings
Scraper.scrape("https://www.texasblackpages.com/united-states/san-antonio")
Scraper.scrape("https://www.texasblackpages.com/united-states/san-antonio?page=2")
Scraper.scrape("https://www.texasblackpages.com/united-states/san-antonio?page=3")
Scraper.scrape("https://www.texasblackpages.com/united-states/san-antonio?page=4")
end
i ever had some problem with you, i do loop though. usually if the page support pagination then the first page it have chance to use query param page also.
def self.scrape
page = 1
loop do
url = "https://www.texasblackpages.com/united-states/san-antonio?page=#{page}"
# do nokogiri parse
# do data scrapping
page += 1
end
end
you can have break on certain page condition.

How to write a while loop properly

I'm trying to scrape a website however I cannot seem to get my while-loop to break out once it hits a page with no more information:
def scrape_verse_items(keyword)
pg = 1
while pg < 1000
puts "page #{pg}"
url = "https://www.bible.com/search/bible?page=#{pg}&q=#{keyword}&version_id=1"
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open(url))
items = doc.css("ul.search-result li.reference")
error = doc.css('div#noresults')
until error.any? do
if keyword != ''
item_hash = {}
items.each do |item|
title = item.css("h3").text.strip
content = item.css("p").text.strip
item_hash[title] = content
end
else
puts "Please enter a valid search"
end
if error.any?
break
end
end
pg += 1
end
item_hash
end
puts scrape_verse_items('joy')
I know this doesn't exactly answer your question, but perhaps you might consider using a different approach altogether.
Using while and until loops can get a bit confusing, and usually isn't the most performant way of doing things.
Maybe you would consider using recursion instead.
I've written a small script that seems to work :
class MyScrapper
def initialize;end
def call(keyword)
puts "Please enter a valid search" && return unless keyword
scrape({}, keyword, 1)
end
private
def scrape(results, keyword, page)
doc = load_page(keyword, page)
return results if doc.css('div#noresults').any?
build_new_items(doc).merge(scrape(results, keyword, page+1))
end
def load_page(keyword, page)
url = "https://www.bible.com/search/bible?page=#{page}&q=#{keyword}&version_id=1"
Nokogiri::HTML(open(url))
end
def build_new_items(doc)
items = doc.css("ul.search-result li.reference")
items.reduce({}) do |list, item|
title = item.css("h3").text.strip
content = item.css("p").text.strip
list[title] = content
list
end
end
end
You call it by doing MyScrapper.new.call("Keyword") (It might make more sense to have this as a module you include or even have them as class methods to avoid the need to instantiate the class.
What this does is, call a method called scrape and you give it the starting results, keyword, and page. It loads the page, if there are no results it returns the existing results it has found.
Otherwise it builds a hash from the page it loaded, and then the method calls itself, and merges the results with the new hash it just build. It does this till there are no more results.
If you want to limit the page results you can just change this like:
return results if doc.css('div#noresults').any?
to this:
return results if doc.css('div#noresults').any? || page > 999
Note: You might want to double-check the results that are being returned are correct. I think they should be but I wrote this quite quickly, so there could always be a small bug hiding somewhere in there.

Foreach loop in XML generator not breaking

I am trying to generate XML, but the loop isn't breaking. Here is a part of the code:
#key = 0
#cont.each do |pr|
xml.product {
#key += 1
puts #key.to_s
begin
#main = Nokogiri::HTML(open(#url+pr['href'], "User-Agent" => "Ruby/#{RUBY_VERSION}","From" => "foo#bar.invalid", "Referer" => "http://www.ruby-lang.org/"))
rescue
puts "rescue"
next
end
puts pr['href']
puts #key.to_s
break //this break doesn't work
#something else
}
end
Most interesting is that in the final generated XML file, break worked. The file contains only one product, but on the console #key was printed fully, which means the foreach loop doesn't break.
Could it be a Nokogiri XML-specific error, because of open brackets in the head of the loop?
In general I think how you're going about trying to generate the XML is confused. Don't convolute your code any more than necessary; Instead of starting to generate some XML then aborting it inside the block because you can't find the page you want, grab the pages you want first, then start processing.
I'd move the begin/rescue block outside the XML generation. Its existence inside the XML generation block results in poor logic and questionable practices of using next and break. Instead I'd recommend something like this untested code:
#main = []
#cont.each do |pr|
begin
#main << Nokogiri::HTML(
open(#url + pr['href'])
)
rescue
puts 'rescue'
next
end
end
builder = Nokogiri::XML::Builder.new do |xml|
xml.root {
xml.products {
#main.each do |m|
xml.product {
xml.id_ m.at('id').text
xml.name m.at('name').text
}
end
}
}
end
puts builder.to_xml
Which makes it easy to see that the code is keying off being able to retrieve a page.
This code is untested because we have no idea what your input values are or what your output should look like. Having valid input, expected output and a working example of your code that demonstrates the problem is essential if you want help debugging a problem with your code.
The use of #url + pr['href'] isn't generally a good idea. Instead use the URI class to build up the URL for you. URI handles encoding and ensures the URI is valid.

Ruby: how can use the dump method to output data to a csv file?

I try to use the ruby standard csv lib to dump out the arr of object to a csv.file , called 'a.csv'
http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-1.9.3/libdoc/csv/rdoc/CSV.html#method-c-dump
dump(ary_of_objs, io = "", options = Hash.new)
but in this method, how can i dump into a file?
there is no such examples exists and help. I google it no example to do for me...
Also, the docs said that...
The next method you can provide is an instance method called
csv_headers(). This method is expected to return the second line of
the document (again as an Array), which is to be used to give each
column a header. By default, ::load will set an instance variable if
the field header starts with an # character or call send() passing the
header as the method name and the field value as an argument. This
method is only called on the first object of the Array.
Anyone knows how to pass the instance method csv_headers() to this dump function?
I haven't tested this out yet, but it looks like io should be set to a file. According to the doc you linked "The io parameter can be used to serialize to a File"
Something like:
f = File.open("filename")
dump(ary_of_objs, io = f, options = Hash.new)
The accepted answer doesn't really answer the question so I thought I'd give a useful example.
First of all if you look at the docs at http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-1.9.3/libdoc/csv/rdoc/CSV.html, if you hover over the method name for dump you see you can click to show source. If you do that you'll see that the dump method attempts to call csv_headers on the first object you pass in from ary_of_objs:
obj_template = ary_of_objs.first
...snip...
headers = obj_template.csv_headers
Then later you see that the method will call csv_dump on each object in ary_of_objs and pass in the headers:
ary_of_objs.each do |obj|
begin
csv << obj.csv_dump(headers)
rescue NoMethodError
csv << headers.map do |var|
if var[0] == #
obj.instance_variable_get(var)
else
obj[var[0..-2]]
end
end
end
end
So we need to augment each entry in array_of_objs to respond to those two methods. Here's an example wrapper class that would take a Hash, and return the hash keys as the CSV headers and then be able to dump each row based on the headers.
class CsvRowDump
def initialize(row_hash)
#row = row_hash
end
def csv_headers
#row.keys
end
def csv_dump(headers)
headers.map { |h| #row[h] }
end
end
There's one more catch though. This dump method wants to write an extra line at the top of the CSV file before the headers, and there's no way to skip that if you call this method due to this code at the top:
# write meta information
begin
csv << obj_template.class.csv_meta
rescue NoMethodError
csv << [:class, obj_template.class]
end
Even if you return '' from CsvRowDump.csv_meta that will still be a blank line where a parse expects the headers. So instead lets let dump write that line and then remove it afterwards when we call dump. This example assumes you have an array of hashes that all have the same keys (which will be the CSV header).
#rows = #hashes.map { |h| CsvRowDump.new(h) }
File.open(#filename, "wb") do |f|
str = CSV::dump(#rows)
f.write(str.split(/\n/)[1..-1].join("\n"))
end

How to change the value of a url parameter in ruby?

What is a better way to do this?
Ideally using a URI parsing class of some sort, rather than relying on my own regex
url = "http://example.com" //or "http://example.com?after=111"
next_url = url.gsub(/after=\d+/,"666")
if !next_url.eql?(url)
if (new2.include?('?') == false)
next_url = url + "?after=666"
else
next_url = url + "&after=666"
end
end
puts next_url
I recommend using the Addressable gem when you are taking URLs apart or putting them together. It's very comprehensive, and has query_values(options = {}) and query_values=(new_query_values) to extract all the query components into a hash, or to rebuild it from a hash. It will also handle decoding and encoding the parameters as needed, things that URI will not do for you.
Not sure about your question, but you probably want something like this?
path, query = url.split('?')
query = (query||'').scan(/(.+)=(.+)/).map{|k, v| "#{k}=#{k == 'after' ? 666 : v}"}.join('&')
puts [path, query].join('?')
There's a Ruby library called URI that handles parsing and building of URLs.

Resources