[kw-pm] Notes from June meeting

[Justin Wheeler]

Actually, it kinda pissed me off to miss the meeting.  I didn't want to
miss it, but I'm the kind of person that forgets where his wallet is the
instant he puts it down.  I'll have to put the next meeting in my
blackberry so it makes noises at me the day of so I remember.

Speaking of screen scraping, a module I wrote on CPAN makes some pretty
hefty usage of screenscraping.  Business::Shipping::UPS -- I will be
moving it into the Business::UPS namespace soon, but last time I tried,
PAUSE was down.

My module uses LWP::UserAgent.  LWP::Simple doesn't support POST (I don't
think.) -- so I used it instead.  It's pretty straightforward, but I'd
think is a pretty good example of screenscraping, since it grabs the first
page, gets a random ID UPS throws at you, posts to the tracking page, etc.

Regards,
Justin Wheeler

--
I hit the CTRL key but I'm still not in control!

On Sat, 21 Jun 2003, lloyd carr wrote:

> I want to sign out the LWP book!
> I need it to understand the REST examples in the "Perl for Web Services"
> book :-)
>
> Justin's curry was good, thankyou for not showing up Justin ;-)
>
> Harry who? ( With few exceptions, I only read things that have been
> rejected by the mass culture )
>
> On Fri, 20 Jun 2003, Daniel R. Allen wrote:
>
> > Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 23:40:31 -0400 (EDT)
> > From: Daniel R. Allen <da at coder.com>
> > To: kw-pm at mail.pm.org
> > Subject: [kw-pm] Notes from June meeting
> >
> > These are not comprehensive, just URLs and things for wrapup that I was
> > thinking about today.
> >
> > Notes from KW.pm June Meeting
> >
> > - discussed YAPC::Canada talks, the Matrix, perl on Microsoft
> >   (activestate), perl as a teaching language.
> >
> > - browse and d/l the proceedings CD at:
> >   http://coder.com/yapc-canada/2003/proceedings/
> >
> > - Presentation on "screen-scraping" and automating web-client tasks.
> >   Sorry, no slides!
> >
> >   - LWP / libwww : library for "writing WWW clients", or more common
> >     subset of that, retrieving WWW content (LWP::Simple). find it on CPAN.
> >
> >   - Note- we also have the book "LWP and Perl" in our Library! Ask
> >     to borrow it and it's yours.  For a month or two, at least.
> >
> >   - HTML::TokeParser : parse HTML, simply. Using a parser is much easier
> >     than trying to hand-roll regular expressions.  Also on CPAN.
> >
> >   - WWW::Mechanize : good tool for general screen-scraping. Basically
> >     a shell around a number of underlying modules, such as HTML::Form,
> >     LWP::Agent, HTTP::Response.  But provides a nice consistant
> >     front-end.  Easy to use. Ditto, CPAN.
> >
> >   - WWW::Mechanize::Shell : Question from Tomas about building the
> >     screen-scraping code according to an interactive session on a
> >     website.  Lo, and behold, there's a module for it. Guess where.
> >
> >   - While we discussed the philosophy of learning programming, I
> >     installed WWW::Mechanize::Shell.  It needs a buttload of other
> >     modules, but once they're installed, it does nearly what Tomas
> >     was asking for.
> >
> >   - Didn't get to legal issues around copying data from peoples' sites.
> >     Basically: if there are terms of use, read them and follow them.
> >     If you run a site, have easy-to-read terms of use.  Anything else?
> >
> >   - Next month: mod_perl talk!
> >
> >
> > Happy... er, Harry Potter Day...
> > -Daniel
> >
> > http://coder.com/ - Prescient Code Solutions - (519) 575-3733 da at coder.com
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > kw-pm at mail.pm.org
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> >
>
> dcarr at sdf.lonestar.org
> SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
>
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