= Object Scraper

== Description

Object scraper is a thin wrapper for hpricot to enable receipt-like extraction of ruby objects from various web sites.

== Install

=== Gem

gem install object-scraper --source http://gemcutter.org

=== Rails

config.gem 'object-scraper', :source => 'http://gemcutter.org'

== Example

class Entry < Object attr_accessor :text, :date end

uri = "http://twitter.com/twitter" pattern = ".status"

Scraper.define(:twitter, :class => :entry, :source => uri, :node => pattern) do |s| s.text { |node| node.at(".entry-content").inner_html } s.date { |node| DateTime.parse(node.at(".timestamp")[:data][/'.*'/].delete("'")) } end

@objects = Scraper.parse(:twitter)

If you define multiple scrapers, you can collect all their objects with one simple method

@objects = Scraper.parse_all

== Advanced Example

It is possible to use other existing HTML parsers instead of hpricot. Just overwrite the according proc object.

require 'nokogiri' Scraper.scrape_source_with = Proc.new { |source| Nokogiri::HTML(source) }

Scraper.define(:twitter, :class => :entry, :source => uri, :node => pattern) do |s|

initialize your objects here accordingly

end

== Rails

All scraper definitions sitting in RAILS_ROOT/scrapers will be taken into account automatically when you use object-scraper as a gem in your rails project.

== Author

• Maintained by {Enrico Genauck}[mailto:[email protected]]