SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Not infrequently, we receive a story submission to SoylentNews that consists of a single URL. Or, a story that contains but a single sentence or paragraph along with the URL. During weekends and holidays, the story submission queue tends to run dry. We have an IRC channel (#rss-bot) that gathers RSS links from around the web. Hmm.
It would be really handy if there were an automated way to "scrape" the contents of that page. In some cases, a simple redirect of the output of a text-based browser like Lynx would do the trick. Unfortunately, all too many sites subscribe to the idea that a web page needs to pull in Javascript and libraries from a myriad of other sites. Failing to do so displays a blank page.
There must be a way to do it — search engines like Google and Bing must extract the page text in order to index it. It would be best to have a general-purpose solution; having a custom template for each site is time-consuming to create and maintain (think if the site changes its layout). Our site is powered by Perl, so that would be the obvious preference.
So, fellow Soylentils, what tools and/or techniques have you used? What has worked for you?
Maybe I'm approaching this the wrong way? When all you have is a hammer... what am I missing here? Is there another approach?
(Score: 3, Informative) by number6 on Saturday June 04 2016, @09:43PM
Web::Scraper
http://search.cpan.org/dist/Web-Scraper/ [cpan.org]
Perl module, Web Scraping Toolkit using HTML and CSS Selectors or XPath expressions, by Tatsuhiko Miyagawa.
* A blog article............http://perlgerl.wordpress.com/2011/02/27/219/
* A comment...............Web::Scraper is so effin awesome. You just yank up some LWP from disk,
add some scraper to it and whambo! you have yourself some local data that the web universe
used to call it's own. Follow that author on CPAN; he's a genius.
How to fetch urls? I want to build a Perl web scraper like Python's urllib
https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/3oiwqn/how_to_fetch_urls_like_in_pythons_urllib/ [reddit.com]
Web Scraping with Perl & PhantomJS (headless WebKit browser)
article, Feb 2013, by Rob Hammond (Perl programmer)
http://blogs.perl.org/users/robhammond/2013/02/web-scraping-with-perl-phantomjs.html [perl.org]
Perl Proxy Scraper
https://phl4nk.wordpress.com/2015/04/11/perl-proxy-scraper/ [wordpress.com]
* A comment...............Neat! I toyed around with a one-liner that does about the same thing for standard output:
perl -Mojo -E 'say g($_)->body =~ /((?:\d{1,3}\.?){4}:\d{1,4})/g for @ARGV' $url1 $url2 ...
how-to-develop-a-good-scraper-on-perl - Google Search [google.com]