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Scrubyt, a quick view:

Posted by Sandro Paganotti in Ruby on Rails - no comments

Today I come up to Scrubyt, an excellent piece of code developed by Peter Szinek, Glenn Gillen and a bunch of other collaborators. What this software do is essentially fetch and operate on XML/HTML pages, here’s an example taken from the official website:

require 'rubygems'
require 'scrubyt'

ebay_data = Scrubyt::Extractor.define do

     fetch 'http://www.ebay.com/'
     fill_textfield 'satitle', 'ipod'
     submit

     record "//table[@class='nol']" do
       name "//td[@class='details']/div/a" 
     end
end

puts ebay_data.to_xml

In this ten lines of code (including the two ‘require’ on top of the page) we fetch ‘ebay.com’ website, then we fill a textfield with the id ‘satitle’ with the text ‘ipod’ and we press the submit button. Next we create a container (named ‘record’) for each table with class ‘nol’ of the returning page (the page containing the results from our ‘ipod’ search) and we fill this container with a ‘name’ variable containing the text within an ‘A’ element incapsulated inside a td with class ‘details’.

If we print the result as xml (as we do in the last line) this will be the output (truncated):

<root>
  <record>
    <name>USB 2.0 Sync Data Cable for iPhone 3G iPod Mini NanoPOWER SELLER-30 DAYS MONEY BACK GUARANTEE-FAST SHIPPING$1.99Free shipping22d&amp;#160;5h&amp;#160;50m</name>
  </record>
  <record>
    <name>EnlargePIONEER 5.8&quot; GPS NEW AVIC-F90BT DVD MP3 IPOD AVICF90BT!!!  HAS THE NEW 2.0 UPDATE INSTALLED  !!!!! 2.0 UPDATE$637.00Free shipping9d&amp;#160;5h&amp;#160;35m</name>
  </record>
  <record>
...

In conclusion, this is a very nice and handy toy that can help us during deployment and test.

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