Optimizing Ruby RSS - ruby

I'm writing a very simple Ruby script to parse tweets out of a twitter RSS feed. Here's the code I have:
require 'rss'
#rss = RSS::Parser.parse('statuses.xml', false)
outputfile = open("output.txt", "w")
#rss.items.each do |i|
pubdate = i.published.to_s
if pubdate.include? '2011-05'
tweet = i.title.to_s
tweet = tweet.gsub(/<title>SlyFlourish: /, "")
tweet = tweet.gsub(/<\/title>/, "\n\n")
outputfile << tweet
end
end
I think I'm missing something about dealing with the objects coming out of the RSS parser. Can someone tell me how I can better pull out the title and date entries from the object returned by the parser?

Is there a reason you chose RSS? Parsing XML is expensive.
I'd consider using JSON instead.
There's also a twitter Ruby gem that makes this really easy:
require "twitter"
Twitter.user_timeline("gavin_morrice").each do |tweet|
puts tweet.text
puts tweet.created_at
end

Related

how to post (http-post) content of pdf using ruby?

I am trying to post (raw) content of a PDF in ruby using the following block
require 'pdf/reader'
require 'curb'
reader = PDF::Reader.new('folder/file.pdf')
raw_string = ''
reader.pages.each do |page|
raw_string = raw_string + page.raw_content.to_s
end
c = Curl::Easy.new('http://0.0.0.0:4567/pdf_upload')
c.http_post(Curl::PostField.content('param1', 'value1'),Curl::PostField.content('param2', 'value2'), c.http_post(Curl::PostField.content('body', raw_string)))
Inside the API implementation params[:body] seems to be empty all the time (though puts raw_string confirms that the variable has all the values.
Also, is there a better way to post pdf content?
Regarding how you're building raw_string...
Instead of:
reader.pages.each do |page|
raw_string = raw_string + page.raw_content.to_s
end
You should be able to do something like one of these:
raw_string = reader.pages.map(&:raw_content).join
raw_string = reader.pages.map{ |p| p.raw_content.to_s }.join
I'd also recommend you write your last line spread across several lines, for clarity and readability:
c.http_post(
Curl::PostField.content('param1', 'value1'),
Curl::PostField.content('param2', 'value2'),
c.http_post(Curl::PostField.content('body', raw_string))
)

How to get RSS feed in xml format for ruby script

I am using the following ruby script from this dashing widget that retrieves an RSS feed and parses it and sends that parsed title and description to a widget.
require 'net/http'
require 'uri'
require 'nokogiri'
require 'htmlentities'
news_feeds = {
"seattle-times" => "http://seattletimes.com/rss/home.xml",
}
Decoder = HTMLEntities.new
class News
def initialize(widget_id, feed)
#widget_id = widget_id
# pick apart feed into domain and path
uri = URI.parse(feed)
#path = uri.path
#http = Net::HTTP.new(uri.host)
end
def widget_id()
#widget_id
end
def latest_headlines()
response = #http.request(Net::HTTP::Get.new(#path))
doc = Nokogiri::XML(response.body)
news_headlines = [];
doc.xpath('//channel/item').each do |news_item|
title = clean_html( news_item.xpath('title').text )
summary = clean_html( news_item.xpath('description').text )
news_headlines.push({ title: title, description: summary })
end
news_headlines
end
def clean_html( html )
html = html.gsub(/<\/?[^>]*>/, "")
html = Decoder.decode( html )
return html
end
end
#News = []
news_feeds.each do |widget_id, feed|
begin
#News.push(News.new(widget_id, feed))
rescue Exception => e
puts e.to_s
end
end
SCHEDULER.every '60m', :first_in => 0 do |job|
#News.each do |news|
headlines = news.latest_headlines()
send_event(news.widget_id, { :headlines => headlines })
end
end
The example rss feed works correctly because the URL is for an xml file. However I want to use this for a different rss feed that does not provide an actual xml file. This rss feed I want is at http://www.ttc.ca/RSS/Service_Alerts/index.rss
This doesn't seem to display anything on the widget. Instead of using "http://www.ttc.ca/RSS/Service_Alerts/index.rss", I also tried "http://www.ttc.ca/RSS/Service_Alerts/index.rss?format=xml" and "view-source:http://www.ttc.ca/RSS/Service_Alerts/index.rss" but with no luck. Does anyone know how I can get the actual xml data related to this rss feed so that I can use it with this ruby script?
You're right, that link does not provide regular XML, so that script won't work in parsing it since it's written specifically to parse the example XML. The rss feed you're trying to parse is providing RDF XML and you can use the Rubygem: RDFXML to parse it.
Something like:
require 'nokogiri'
require 'rdf/rdfxml'
rss_feed = 'http://www.ttc.ca/RSS/Service_Alerts/index.rss'
RDF::RDFXML::Reader.open(rss_feed) do |reader|
# use reader to iterate over elements within the document
end
From here you can try learning how to use RDFXML to extract the content you want. I'd begin by inspecting the reader object for methods I could use:
puts reader.methods.sort - Object.methods
That will print out the reader's own methods, look for one you might be able to use for your purposes, such as reader.each_entry
To further dig down you can inspect what each entry looks like:
reader.each_entry do |entry|
puts "----here's an entry----"
puts entry.inspect
end
or see what methods you can call on the entry:
reader.each_entry do |entry|
puts "----here's an entry's methods----"
puts entry.methods.sort - Object.methods
break
end
I was able to crudely find some titles and descriptions using this hack job:
RDF::RDFXML::Reader.open('http://www.ttc.ca/RSS/Service_Alerts/index.rss') do |reader|
reader.each_object do |object|
puts object.to_s if object.is_a? RDF::Literal
end
end
# returns:
# TTC Service Alerts
# http://www.ttc.ca/Service_Advisories/index.jsp
# TTC Service Alerts.
# TTC.ca
# http://www.ttc.ca
# http://www.ttc.ca/images/ttc-main-logo.gif
# Service Advisory
# http://www.ttc.ca/Service_Advisories/all_service_alerts.jsp#Service+Advisory
# 196 York University Rocket route diverting northbound via Sentinel, Finch due to a collision that has closed the York U Bus way.
# - Affecting: Bus Routes: 196 York University Rocket
# 2013-12-17T13:49:03.800-05:00
# Service Advisory (2)
# http://www.ttc.ca/Service_Advisories/all_service_alerts.jsp#Service+Advisory+(2)
# 107B Keele North route diverting northbound via Keele, Lepage due to a collision that has closed the York U Bus way.
# - Affecting: Bus Routes: 107 Keele North
# 2013-12-17T13:51:08.347-05:00
But I couldn't quickly find a way to know which one was a title, and which a description :/
Finally, if you still can't find how to extract what you want, start a new question with this info.
Good luck!

Need help exporting parsed results, via Nokogiri, and exporting to CSV,. Only last parsed result is shown, why?

This is killing me and searching here and the big G is confusing me even more.
I followed the tutorial at Railscasts #190 on Nokogiri and was able to write myself a nice little parser:
require 'rubygems'
require 'nokogiri'
require 'open-uri'
url = "http://www.target.com/c/movies-entertainment/-/N-5xsx0/Ntk-All/Ntt-wwe/Ntx-matchallpartial+rel+E#navigation=true&facetedValue=/-/N-5xsx0&viewType=medium&sortBy=PriceLow&minPrice=0&maxPrice=10&isleaf=false&navigationPath=5xsx0&parentCategoryId=9975218&RatingFacet=0&customPrice=true"
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open(url))
puts doc.at_css("title").text
doc.css(".standard").each do |item|
title = item.at_css("span.productTitle a")[:title]
format = item.at_css("span.description").text
price = item.at_css(".price-label").text[/\$[0-9\.]+/]
link = item.at_css("span.productTitle a")[:href]
puts "#{title}, #{format}, #{price}, #{link}"
end
I'm happy with the results and able to see it in the Windows console. However, I want to export the results to a CSV file and have tried numerous ways (with no luck) and I know I'm missing something. My latest updated code (after downloading the html files) is below:
require 'rubygems'
require 'nokogiri'
require 'csv'
#title = Array.new
#format = Array.new
#price = Array.new
#link = Array.new
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open("index1.html"))
doc.css(".standard").each do |item|
#title << item.at_css("span.productTitle a")[:title]
#format << item.at_css("span.description").text
#price << item.at_css(".price-label").text[/\$[0-9\.]+/]
#link << item.at_css("span.productTitle a")[:href]
end
CSV.open("file.csv", "wb") do |csv|
csv << ["title", "format", "price", "link"]
csv << [#title, #format, #price, #link]
end
It works and spits a file out for me, but just the last result. I followed the tutorial at Andrew!: WEb Scraping... and trying to mix what I'm trying to achieve with someone else's process is confusing.
I assume it's looping through all of the results and only printing the last. Can someone give me pointers on how I should loop this (if that's the problem) so that all the results are in their respective columns?
Thanks in advance.
You're storing values in four arrays, but you're not enumerating the arrays when you generate your output.
Here is a possible fix:
CSV.open("file.csv", "wb") do |csv|
csv << ["title", "format", "price", "link"]
until #title.empty?
csv << [#title.shift, #format.shift, #price.shift, #link.shift]
end
end
Note that this is a destructive operation that shifts the values off of the arrays one at a time, so in the end they will all be empty.
There are more efficient ways to read and convert the data, but this will hopefully do what you want for now.
There are several things you could do to write this more in the "Ruby way":
require 'rubygems'
require 'nokogiri'
require 'csv'
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open("index1.html"))
CSV.open('file.csv', 'wb') do |csv|
csv << %w[title format price link]
doc.css('.standard').each do |item|
csv << [
item.at_css('span.productTitle a')[:title]
item.at_css('span.description').text
item.at_css('.price-label').text[/\$[0-9\.]+/]
item.at_css('span.productTitle a')[:href]
]
end
end
Without sample HTML it's not possible to test this, but, based on your code, it looks like it'd work.
Notice that in your code you're using instance variables. They're not necessary because you aren't defining a class to have an instance of. You can use local values instead.

Parsing XML with Ruby

I'm way new to working with XML but just had a need dropped in my lap. I have been given an usual (to me) XML format. There are colons within the tags.
<THING1:things type="Container">
<PART1:Id type="Property">1234</PART1:Id>
<PART1:Name type="Property">The Name</PART1:Name>
</THING1:things>
It is a large file and there is much more to it than this but I hope this format will be familiar to someone. Does anyone know a way to approach an XML document of this sort?
I'd rather not just write a brute-force way of parsing the text but I can't seem to make any headway with REXML or Hpricot and I suspect it is due to these unusual tags.
my ruby code:
require 'hpricot'
xml = File.open( "myfile.xml" )
doc = Hpricot::XML( xml )
(doc/:things).each do |thg|
[ 'Id', 'Name' ].each do |el|
puts "#{el}: #{thg.at(el).innerHTML}"
end
end
...which is just lifted from: http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2006/12/09/parsing-xml-with-hpricot/
And I figured I would be able to figure some stuff out from here but this code returns nothing. It doens't error. It just returns.
As #pguardiario mentioned, Nokogiri is the de facto XML and HTML parsing library. If you wanted to print out the Id and Name values in your example, here is how you would do it:
require 'nokogiri'
xml_str = <<EOF
<THING1:things type="Container">
<PART1:Id type="Property">1234</PART1:Id>
<PART1:Name type="Property">The Name</PART1:Name>
</THING1:things>
EOF
doc = Nokogiri::XML(xml_str)
thing = doc.at_xpath('//things')
puts "ID = " + thing.at_xpath('//Id').content
puts "Name = " + thing.at_xpath('//Name').content
A few notes:
at_xpath is for matching one thing. If you know you have multiple items, you want to use xpath instead.
Depending on your document, namespaces can be problematic, so calling doc.remove_namespaces! can help (see this answer for a brief discussion).
You can use the css methods instead of xpath if you're more comfortable with those.
Definitely play around with this in irb or pry to investigate methods.
Resources
Parsing an HTML/XML document
Getting started with Nokogiri
Update
To handle multiple items, you need a root element, and you need to remove the // in the xpath query.
require 'nokogiri'
xml_str = <<EOF
<root>
<THING1:things type="Container">
<PART1:Id type="Property">1234</PART1:Id>
<PART1:Name type="Property">The Name1</PART1:Name>
</THING1:things>
<THING2:things type="Container">
<PART2:Id type="Property">2234</PART2:Id>
<PART2:Name type="Property">The Name2</PART2:Name>
</THING2:things>
</root>
EOF
doc = Nokogiri::XML(xml_str)
doc.xpath('//things').each do |thing|
puts "ID = " + thing.at_xpath('Id').content
puts "Name = " + thing.at_xpath('Name').content
end
This will give you:
Id = 1234
Name = The Name1
ID = 2234
Name = The Name2
If you are more familiar with CSS selectors, you can use this nearly identical bit of code:
doc.css('things').each do |thing|
puts "ID = " + thing.at_css('Id').content
puts "Name = " + thing.at_css('Name').content
end
If in a Rails environment, the Hash object is extended and one can take advantage of the the method from_xml:
xml = File.open("myfile.xml")
data = Hash.from_xml(xml)

Parse ATOM in Ruby with custom namespaces

I'm trying to read this ATOM Feed (http://ffffound.com/feed), but I'm unable to get to any of the values which are defined as part of the namespace e.g. media:content and media:thumbnail.
Do I need to make the parser aware of the namespaces?
Here's what I 've got:
require 'rss/2.0'
require 'open-uri'
source = "http://ffffound.com/feed"
content = ""
open(source) do |s| content = s.read end
rss = RSS::Parser.parse(content, false)
I believe you would have to use libxml-ruby for that.
gem 'libxml-ruby', '>= 0.8.3'
require 'xml'
xml = open("http://ffffound.com/feed")
parser = XML::Parser.string(xml, :options =>XML::Parser::Options::RECOVER)
doc = parser.parse
doc.find("channel").first.find("items").each do |item|
puts item.find("media:content").first
#and just guessing you want that url thingy
puts item.find("media:content").first.attributes.get_attribute("url").value
end
I hope that points you in the right direction.

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