Back in the earlier days of the internet I remember that in certain browsers, every time you downloaded an image or a file, the URL of where that file was downloaded from would be written into that file's properties (I guess the summary tab?). I think Netscape v2 did this if I remember correctly.
I really miss that kind of functionality as every once in a while I'll run into a neat little program stored somewhere in the depths of my hard drive and wonder where I got it from originally.
I googled around but I'm not quite sure what terms to use to describe what I'm looking for. So I'm wondering if anyone knows of a Firefox plug-in or something similar that would do this?
If you use the DownThemAll! extension for Firefox, you can tell it to prepend the URL of the site to the downloaded file name...
thus you end up with files like:
download.com_utils_compression_ABCD32.exe
It also works really well when you want to download/queue a bunch of files.
You download http://example.com/foo to ~/Desktop/foo, and you want to see the originating URL in the properties of the local file foo?
Back when I used OS X, I remember Safari used to record the original URL in the resource fork of the downloaded file. Can't remember what the named fork is, well, named, but it'll show up in the properties panel from Finder. Since it's there, Spotlight will probably index it, too, but I haven't used OS X since 10.3.
If you use Opera, and haven't cleared the file out from your download manager, select the download and it'll show the original URL that the file is from in the properties pane.
Is this what you want? If so... well, I don't know of a similar Firefox extension, but it'll clarify the question.
For the IE Browser I use the hell out of Fidler to look at all traffic going across the wire.
For FireFox, you can use the FireBug plugin. There is a "Net" tab that will show you request information that is going across the wire.
Most of the time you can use one of these tools to see what URL was requested in order to start a download. You can also view all the get and post information that might need to be sent in order to have your request succeed.
Fidler is here: http://www.fiddlertool.com/fiddler/
FireBug is here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843
Best of Luck!
Related
I need to download a pdf from a website which does not provide a link ending with (.pdf) using ruby. Manually, when i click on the link to download the pdf, it takes me to a new page and the dialog box to save/open the file appears after some time.
Please help me in downloading the file.
The link
You an do this
require 'open-uri'
File.open('my_file_name.pdf', "wb") do |file|
file.write open('http://someurl.com/2013-1-2/somefile/download').read
end
I have been doing this for my projects and it works.
If you just need a simple ruby script to do it, I'd just run wget. Like this exec 'wget "http://path.to.the.file/and/some/params"'
At that point though, you might as well run wget.
The other way, is to just run a get on the page that you know the pdf is at
source = Net::HTTP.get("http://the.website.com", "/and/some/params")
There are a number of other http clients that you could use, but as long as you make a get request to the endpoint that the pdf is at, it should give you the raw data. Then you can just rename the file, and you'll have the pdf
In your case, I ran the following commands to get the pdf
wget http://www.lawcommission.gov.np/en/documents/prevailing-laws/constitution/func-download/129/chk,d8c4644b0f086a04d8d363cb86fb1647/no_html,1/
mv index.html thefile.pdf
Then open the pdf. Note that these are linux commands. If you want to get the file with a ruby script, you could use something like what I previously mentioned.
Update:
There is an added complication that was not initially stated, which is that the url to the pdf changes every time there is an update to the pdf. In order to make this work, you probably want to do something involving web scraping. I suggest nokogiri. This way you can look at the page where the download is and then perform a get request on the desired URL. Furthermore, the server that hosts the pdf is misconfigured, and breaks chrome within a few seconds of opening the page.
How to solve this problem: I went to the site, and refreshed it. Then broke the connection to the server (press the X where there would otherwise be a refresh button). Then right click next to the download link, and select inspect element. Then browse the dom to find something that is definitively identifying (like an id). Thankfully, I found something <strong id="telecharger"> Download</strong>. This means that you can use something like page.css('strong#telecharger')[0].parent['href'] This should give you a URL. Then you can perform a get request as described above. I don't have time to make the script for you (too much work to do), but this should be enough to solve the problem.
I'm trying to locate the "throbber" (or "spinner") image used in the Firefox 3.6x chrome to show that a request is being processed:
Firefox throbber http://i49.tinypic.com/kd7bth.png
I'm not familiar with the source code structure for Firefox, and a simple search hasn't yielded the answer.
Does anyone know which file I'm looking for? (E.g. can you provide a link to the file in the Mercurial repository, or tell me how to find it?).
Inside of your Firefox installation it's inside chrome/classic.jar, the path is: skin/classic/global/media/throbber.png
I'm not sure where it is in the Mozilla repository though.
Here's some info on how to customize it: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Throbber_URL
It looks like IE7 doesn't reload the latest version of my stylesheet each time I upload a new version on the server.
This is annoying as I am debugging my .css file to make it work on IE...
Tried to empty the browser cache but still not working.
Thanks for your help.
Ctrl-F5 - forcible way to reload in IE
Include your version number in the file name. myfile_v1234.css
When testing, every time you do an update you can just wite "stylesheet.css?r=98123"
As long as the query string is different, it'll be downloaded again.
If you need, you can use javascript to append Math.random(), to get the random number. Not required on production though, when updates would be stable.
2 Questions:
Does IE eventually load with the newer stylesheet?
How are you saving the changes to the server (SSH, Web Interface, etc.)?
I ask because I ran into an issue with a web-based file management system a while back where one browser would show the CSS just fine, the other wouldn't, and we noticed the issue of which browser played nicely depended on which browser we used to upload the CSS.
The reason turned out to be that IE gave the CSS file a different MIME type than Firefox. If you continue to notice the issue even when you've cleared the cache, check the MIME type of the file using Firefox by going to Tools > Page Info.
Also, if it is simply a caching issue, consider turning caching off in IE. I believe this should be an Advanced Option under Internet Options.
Also, you may want to try creating a special developer environment for IE (if it comes down to it.) Perhaps have another machine with IE7 and no caching and any other features turned off (A kiosk mode, perhaps), and then previewing the page on that machine.
Thanks to you all!
I did manage to solve my problem with the "stupid" Ctrl+F5, and by changing the Internet Parameters of Windows to reload content every new visit.
When I am using a form containing <input id="myFile" type="file" runat="server" /> to upload a file, my server-side code only sees the filename without the full path when using Firefox, while it works just fine in IE.
Is it possible to retrieve the full file path server-side in this case?
You cannot. Actually, only IE gives this information which isn't important for the server in most cases. Neither FF nor Opera, at least, provide this info.
[UPDATE] Also tried with Safari, still no path... Somebody reported that Chrome might provide the info, although being a beta, that might change...
Perhaps you might need them in some intranet cases. In such case, you might ask the user to paste the path in a secondary input field... Not very friendly, but at least they will know they provide the info.
Actually, I know some people needed this info for some reasons, so they used JavaScript to pick up the path from the file input field and put it in an hidden field. FF developers found it was insecure (you can learn a lot from a simple path... like the login name of the user!) so prohibited such usage in FF3, making some people angry against this release...
References: Firefox 3's file upload box mentioned in Firefox 3 annoyance: Keying-in disabled in file upload control ...; also File input box disabled leads to great usability problem, among many other ones.
You can never be sure of getting a full filepath or even a reliable filename or content-type submitted in a file upload file. Even if you get a full filepath you don't know what the path separator character is on the client's operating system, or whether a file extension (if present) denotes anything at all.
If your application requires the filepath/filename/content-type of a submitted file for anything more than giving the user a default title for the item uploaded, it's doing something wrong and will need fixing.
I already stated this in a comment, but I think it bears repeating.
Microsoft opted to make the file control give the entire path to the file for use in intranet applications.
The HTML specification only makes mention of what the value should contain in one spot:
User agents may use the value of the
value attribute as the initial file
name.
However, they also have examples of what the multipart/form-data encoding should look like, and it doesn't contain the file path.
In other words, IE is breaking the standard and you can't rely on other browsers, even later versions of IE, to support it.
I'm trying to load an image from the Firefox cache as the title suggests. I'm running Ubuntu, so the location of my cache is /home/me/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxx.default/Cache
However, in the Cache (and this is on Mac, too) the filenames are just ridiculous combinations of letters and numbers. Is there a way to pinpoint a certain file?
You should take a look at the source code of the CacheViewer Add-on.
Download the file instead of installing it (right click and save as) and then extract it (it's just a Zip file, even though it has a .xpi extension), then extract the cacheviewer.jar file inside the resulting chrome folder. Finally go into content and then cacheviewer to find the javascript and XUL files.
From my brief investigation, the useful routines are in the cacheviewer.js file, though if you were hoping there would be a simple javascript one liner for accessing cached items you're probably going to be disappointed. The XUL files (which are just XML) are helpful in working out which JS functions are called to perform particular tasks. I'm not too sure how all this maps into Greasemonkey, rather than the extension environment, but hopefully there's enough code to get you started.
Ummm, that really is an internal implementation detail. But I suggest looking at how about:cache?device=disk and about:cache-entry?client=HTTP&sb=1&key=https://stackoverflow.com/Content/img/wmd/blockquote.png are implemented.
Also, http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1832 gives details, too. Note that Firefox doesn't use a separate file for everything...
And of course, Firefox may change the format at any time.
Just give your img src= attribute the full URL. If the image happens to be cacheable (the server sends an appropriate Expires: or Cache-control: header, for example) and it's already in the cache, Firefox will not hit the network.
HTTP caching is supposed to be invisible. When you're generating content, you generally shouldn't worry about it.
You can point REDbot at a URL to see all sorts of delicious information about its cacheability.