Wombat

Generic Web crawler with an elegant DSL that parses structured data from web pages.

Usage:

gem install wombat

Obs: Requires ruby 1.9

Crawling a page:

The simplest way to use Wombat is by calling Wombat.crawl and passing it a block:


# => github_crawler.rb

#coding: utf-8
require 'wombat'

Wombat.crawl do
  base_url "http://www.github.com"
  list_page "/"

  headline "xpath=//h1"

  what_is "css=.column.secondary p", :html

  explore "xpath=//ul/li[2]/a" do |e|
    e.gsub(/Explore/, "LOVE")
  end

  benefits do |b|
    b.first_benefit "css=.column.leftmost h3"
    b.second_benefir "css=.column.leftmid h3"
    b.third_benefit "css=.column.rightmid h3"
    b.fourth_benefit "css=.column.rightmost h3"
  end
end

The code above is gonna return the following hash:

{
  "headline" => "1,316,633 people hosting over 3,951,378 git repositories", 
  "what_is" => "GitHub is the best way to collaborate with others.  Fork, send pull requests and manage all your <strong>public</strong> and <strong>private</strong> git repositories.",
  "explore" => "LOVE GitHub",
  "benefits" => {
    "first_benefit"  => "Team management", 
    "second_benefit" => "Code review", 
    "third_benefit"  => "Reliable code hosting", 
    "fourth_benefit" => "Open source collaboration"
  }
}

This is just a sneak peek of what Wombat can do. For the complete documentation, please check the project Wiki.

API Documentation.

Contributing to Wombat

Check out the latest master to make sure the feature hasn't been implemented or the bug hasn't been fixed yet
Check out the issue tracker to make sure someone already hasn't requested it and/or contributed it
Fork the project
Start a feature/bugfix branch
Commit and push until you are happy with your contribution
Make sure to add tests for it. This is important so I don't break it in a future version unintentionally.
Please try not to mess with the Rakefile, version, or history. If you want to have your own version, or is otherwise necessary, that is fine, but please isolate to its own commit so I can cherry-pick around it.

Contributors

Felipe Lima (@felipecsl)
Daniel Naves de Carvalho (@danielnc)
@sigi

Changelog

version 1.0.0

Breaking change: Metadata#format renamed to Metadata#document_format due to method name clash with Kernel#format

version 0.5.0

version 0.4.0

Added utility method Wombat.crawl that eliminates the need to have a ruby class instance to use Wombat. Now you can use just Wombat.crawl and start working. The class based format still works as before though.

version 0.3.1

Added the ability to provide a block to Crawler#crawl and override the default crawler properties for a one off run (thanks to @danielnc)