Is there any gem in ruby to generate a summary of an url similar to what facebook does when you post a link.
None that I'm aware of, but it should't be too hard to roll your own. In the simplest case you can just require 'open-uri' and then use the open method to retrieve the contents of the site, or go for one of the HTTP libraries.
Once you got the document, all you have to do is use something like Nokogori or Hpricot to get the title, first paragraph of text and an image and you are done.
Generating a thumbnail isn't a straightforward task. The page has to be rendered, the window captured, shrunk down, then stored or returned. While it would be possible for a gem to do it, there would be significant overhead.
There are websites that can create the thumbnails, then you can reference the image:
Websnapr
Webthumb
ShrinkTheWeb
iWEBTOOL
I haven't tried them, but there's a good page discussing the first two on The Accidental Technologist.
If you need some text from the page, its simple to grab some, but making it be sensible is a different problem:
require 'nokogiri'
require 'open-uri'
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open('http://www.example.com'))
page_text = doc.text
print page_text.gsub(/\s+/, ' ').squeeze(' ')[0..99]
# >> IANA — Example domains Domains Numbers Protocols About IANA Example Domains As described in RFC 2606
Related
I need to fetch some data but I'm completely stumped after trying a few things.
I want to access Airlines & Destinations from the Albuquerque_International_Sunport's wiki page - keep in mind, I'll be going through a prepopulated list of airports with this data.
There are multiple "types" of Airlines: Passenger, Cargo, sometimes there's other (sub?)sections; other times there are none:
Articles for multiple airports will be accessed automatically - including some less known airports. This means I need to:
Check if "Airlines & Destinations" section exists
Take all data inside of any table
Scrape it; otherwise do nothing
I've tried using the ruby wikipedia-client gem however, the .raw_data method isn't even returning the section data:
Next, I went to Wikipedia's API: unless I am mistaken, but it doesn't return "section" names! This doesn't seem right but I wasn't able to get it working.
So I suppose that leaves Nokogiri. I can grab and parse the pages fine, but:
How would I go about detecting "Airlines & Destinations" section presence, getting all table data BEFORE end of section? I have a suspicion I need some tricky Xpath for this.
Seems to be the only viable solution.
Any thoughts welcome. Putting a bounty on this question when I can.
Edit: Perhaps it's better to simply somehow grab a list of all airlines in the world and hit them against HTML? Seems like it could be computationally expensive.
Well, I'm not an expert user of Nokogiri but maybe this can give you some idea.
require 'nokogiri'
require 'open-uri'
page = Nokogiri::HTML(open("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albuquerque_International_Sunport"))
# this is the passenger table
page.xpath('//*[#id="mw-content-text"]/div/table[2]/tr').each do |tr|
p tr.text()
puts "-"*50
end
# this is the cargo table
page.xpath('//*[#id="mw-content-text"]/div/table[3]/tr').each do |tr|
p tr.text()
puts "-"*50
end
I would want to get a structured version of a Wikiquote page via JSON (basically I need all phrases)
Example: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fight_Club_(film)
I tried with: http://en.wikiquote.org/w/api.php?format=xml&action=parse&page=Fight_Club_(film)&prop=text
but I get all HTML source code. I need each pharse as an element of an Array
How could I achieve that with DBPEDIA?
For one thing Iam not sure whether you can query wiki quotes using DBpedia and secondly, DBpedia gives you only info box data in a structured way, it does not in a any way the article content in a structured way. Instead with a little bit of trouble you can use the Media wiki api to get the data
EDIT
The URI you are trying gives you a text so this will make things easier, but not completely.
Try this piece of code in your console:
require 'Nokogiri'
content = JSON.parse(open("http://en.wikiquote.org/w/api.php?format=json&action=parse&page=Fight_Club_%28film%29&prop=text").read)
data = content['parse']['text']['*']
xpath_data = Nokogiri::HTML data
xpath_data.xpath("//ul/li").map{|data_node| data_node.text}
This is the closest I have come to an answer, of course this is not completely right because you will get a lot on unnecessary data. But if you dig into Nokogiri and xpath and find out how to pin point the nodes you need you can get a solution which will give you correct quotes at least 90% of the time.
Just change the format to JSON. Look up the Wikipedia API for more details.
http://en.wikiquote.org/w/api.php?format=json&action=parse&page=Fight_Club_(film)&prop=text
I have a number of data files to process from a data warehouse that have the following format:
:header 1 ...
:header n
# remarks 1 ...
# remarks n
# column header 1
# column header 2
DATA ROWS
(Example: "#### ## ## ##### ######## ####### ###afp## ##e###")
The data is separated by white spaces and has both numbers and other ASCII chars. Some of those pieces of data will be split up and made more meaningful.
All of the data will go into a database, initially an SQLite db for development, and then pushed up to another, more permanent, storage.
These files will be pulled in actually via HTTP from the remote server and I will have to crawl a bit to get some of it as they span folders and many files.
I was hopeful to get some input what the best tools and methods may be to accomplish this the "Ruby way", as well as to abstract out some of this. Otherwise, I'll tackle it probably similar to how I would in Perl or other such approaches I've taken before.
I was thinking along the lines of using OpenURI to open each url, then if input is HTML collect links to crawl, otherwise process the data. I would use String.scan to break apart the file appropriately each time into a multi-dimensional array parsing each component based on the established formatting by the data provider. Upon completion, push the data into the database. Move on to next input file/uri. Rinse and repeat.
I figure I must be missing some libs that those with more experience would use to clean/quicken this process up dramatically and make the script much more flexible for reuse on other data sets.
Additionally, I will be graphing and visualizing this data as well as generating reports, so perhaps that should too be considered.
Any input as to perhaps a better approach or libs to simply this?
Your question focuses on a lot on "low level" details -- parsing URL's and so on. One key aspect of the "Ruby Way" is "Don't reinvent the wheel." Leverage existing libraries. :)
My recommendation? First, leverage a crawler such as spider or anemone. Second, use Nokogiri for HTML/XML parsing. Third, store the results. I recommend this because you might do different analyses later and you don't want to throw away the hard work of your spidering.
Without knowing too much about your constraints, I would look at storing your results in MongoDB. After thinking this, I did a quick search and found a nice tutorial Scraping a blog with Anemone and MongoDB.
I've written probably a bajillion spiders and site analyzers and find that Ruby has some nice tools that should make this an easy process.
OpenURI makes it easy to retrieve pages.
URI.extract makes it easy to find links in pages. From the docs:
Description
Extracts URIs from a string. If block given, iterates through all matched URIs. Returns nil if block given or array with matches.
require "uri"
URI.extract("text here http://foo.example.org/bla and here mailto:test#example.com and here also.")
# => ["http://foo.example.com/bla", "mailto:test#example.com"]
Simple, untested, logic to start might look like:
require "openuri"
require "uri"
urls_to_scan = %w[
http://www.example.com/page1
http://www.example.com/page2
]
loop do
break if urls_to_scan.empty?
url = urls_to_scan.shift
html = open(url).read
# you probably want to do something to make sure the URLs are not
# pointing outside the site you're walking.
#
# Something like:
#
# URI.extract(html).select{ |u| u[%r{^http://www\.example\.com}i] }
#
new_urls = URI.extract(html)
if (new_urls.any?)
urls_to_scan += new_urls
else
; # parse your file as data using the content in html
end
end
Unless you own the site you're crawling, you want to be kind and gentle: Don't run as fast as possible because it's not your pipe. Pay attention to the site's robot.txt file or risk being banned.
There are true web-crawler gems for Ruby, but the basic task is so simple I never bother with them. If you want to check out other alternatives, visit some of the links to the right for other questions on SO that touch on this subject.
If you need more power or flexibility, the Nokogiri gem makes short work of parsing HTML, allowing you to use CSS accessors to search for tags of interest. There are some pretty powerful gems for making it easy to grab pages such as typhoeus.
Finally, while ActiveRecord, which is recommended in some comments, is nice, finding documentation for using it outside of Rails can be difficult or confusing. I recommend using Sequel. It is a great ORM, very flexible, and well documented.
Hi I would start by taking a very close look at the gem called Mechanize before firing up any basic open-uri stuff - cause it's build into mechanize. It's a brilliant, fast, and easy to use gem for automating web-crawling. Since your data-format is pretty strange (at least compared to json, xml or html) I don't think you will make any use of the build-in parser - but you could still take a look at it. it's called nokogiri and is extremely smart as well. But in the last end, after crawling and fetching the resources, you will probably have to go with some good old regular expression stuff.
Good luck!
I would like to crawl a popular site (say Quora) that doesn't have an API and get some specific information and dump it into a file - say either a csv, .txt, or .html formatted nicely :)
E.g. return only a list of all the 'Bios' of the Users of Quora that have, listed in their publicly available information, the occupation 'UX designer'.
How would I do that in Ruby ?
I have a moderate enough level of understanding of how Ruby & Rails work. I just completed a Rails app - mainly all written by myself. But I am no guru by any stretch of the imagination.
I understand RegExs, etc.
Your best bet would be to use Mechanize.It can follow links, submit forms, anything you will need, web client-wise. By the way, don't use regexes to parse HTML. Use an HTML parser.
If you want something more high level, try wombat, which is this gem I built on top of Mechanize and Nokogiri. It is able to parse pages and follow links using a really simple and high level DSL.
I know the answer has been accepted, but Hpricot is also very popular for parsing HTML.
All you have to do is take a look at the html source of the pages and try to find a XPath or CSS expression that matches the desired elements, then use something like:
doc.search("//p[#class='posted']")
Mechanize is awesome. If you're looking to learn something new though, you could take a look at Scrubyt: https://github.com/scrubber/scrubyt. It looks like Mechanize + Hpricot. I've never used it, but it seems interesting.
Nokogiri is great, but I find the output messy to work with. I wrote a ruby gem to easily create classes off HTML: https://github.com/jassa/hyper_api
The HyperAPI gem uses Nokogiri to parse HTML with CSS selectors.
E.g.
Post = HyperAPI.new_class do
string title: 'div#title'
string body: 'div#body'
string author: '#details .author'
integer comments_count: '#extra .comment' do
size
end
end
# => Post
post = Post.new(html_string)
# => #<Post title: 'Hi there!', body: 'This blog post will talk about...', author: 'Bob', comments_count: 74>
I am trying to find a way of finding repeat patterns in webpages so that i can extract the content into my database.
EDIT : I don't know what the repeat pattern is before hand so i can't just search for a given pattern via a regex or something.
For example if you have 10 sites selling cars but the sites are all different, looking on each site the cars are listed in html in a repeated way down the page for this site.
The other sites will be listed in a different way but each with a repeated pattern.
Does anyone know how, or have any experience of this sort of thing?
i love ruby so was hoping to do it in ruby if any one has or knows of any libs / gems that may help me out ?
Rick, machine pattern matching is a complicated topic, and not something that you'll find a good library for out of the box on Ruby.
Kyle's answer was a start, once you get the page with Ruby, the typical techology for this would be xpath or "The XML Path Language".
Using Xpath you can write simple selectors that will extract every item matching a pattern, for instance, every link on an HTML document might be //a, every h1 would be //h1, and every image directly inside a div, where the image has the class "car" would be something like: //div/image[class="car"].
The result of the XPath is an enumerable list of each item, you can then query for sub-elements, get the content() of the elements, and build relationships to extract the data you need.
The go-to library for Ruby is called Nokogiri, and is avaiable as a gem - the direct documentation is a little weak, but it's all covered there if you know what to look for.
Some libraries for Ruby combine the crawling, with an easy way to access the underlying HTML/XML as a Nokogiri document, one such example is Anemone which is a "framework for building web spiders in Ruby" - and I can recomment it very highly.
In Ruby, if you want to get the text of a webpage all you have to do is use the Net::HTTP namespace. The get method returns a string representation of the webpage.
Net::HTTP.get 'http://www.target-site.com', '/target-page.html'
You're probably going to want to use some sort of XML Parser after that to make a model of the page and navigate over it. I've heard good things about Hpricot.