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How To Write Your First Ruby Web Bot In Watir. Time for the fun stuff now. The holy grail for a lot of Internet Marketers is automation. This can be obtained through simple iMacros scripts, some PHP scripts on a server, or with a little tool called Watir using the Ruby programming language. All of these combos have their own inherent advantages and disadvantages, but that’s not something I’m going to go over here. I like to use Watir for a lot of botting needs, so that’s what I’m going to show you how to do today. Why Ruby? For anyone who has had the joy of switching to Ruby from other languages, this question should be a no brainer. As for Watir, here’s the basic run down. So Watir exists for noble causes, but there are obviously other ways you can utilise the power that it gives you. Let’s Get Started Ok, so there’s a couple things you need to do to prepare to write bots with Watir.

Next, you should install Firefox. Once Firefox is installed, you need to get the JSSH Plugin installed as well. Party Time Seems easy enough, right? Selenium - Web Browser Automation. Selenium 2.21.2. Python bindings for Selenium Python language bindings for Selenium WebDriver. The selenium package is used automate web browser interaction from Python. Several browsers/drivers are supported (Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, PhantomJS), as well as the Remote protocol. Python 2.6, 2.7Python 3.2, 3.3 If you have pip on your system, you can simply install or upgrade the Python bindings: pip install -U selenium Alternately, you can download the source distribution from PyPI (e.g. selenium-2.41.tar.gz), unarchive it, and run: python setup.py install Note: both of the methods described above install selenium as a system-wide package That will require administrative/root access to ther machine.

Open a new Firefox browserload the page at the given URL from selenium import webdriver browser = webdriver.Firefox() browser.get(' open a new Firefox browserload the Yahoo homepagesearch for "seleniumhq"close the browser Run the server from the command line: Web Scraping with Python. Exclusive offer: get 50% off this eBook here Expert Python Programming — Save 50% Best practices for designing, coding, and distributing your Python software by Javier Collado | November 2008 | Open Source Web scraping is the set of techniques used the to get some information, structured only for presentation purposes, from a website automatically instead of copying it manually.

This article by Javier Collado will show how this could be done using python in the steps that require some development. To perform this task, usually three basic steps are followed: Explore the website to find out where the desired information is located in the HTML DOM treeDownload as many web pages as neededParse downloaded web pages and extract the information from the places found in the exploration step The exploration step is performed manually with the aid of some tools that make it easier to locate the information and reduce the development time in next steps.

So, our scraping strategy will be Explore Download. Emulating a Browser in Python with mechanize. It is always useful to know how to quickly instantiate a browser in the command line or inside your python scripts. Every time I need to automate any task regarding web systems I do use this recipe to emulate a browser in python: import mechanize import cookielib # Browser br = mechanize.Browser() # Cookie Jar cj = cookielib.LWPCookieJar() br.set_cookiejar(cj) # Browser options br.set_handle_equiv(True) br.set_handle_gzip(True) br.set_handle_redirect(True) br.set_handle_referer(True) br.set_handle_robots(False) # Follows refresh 0 but not hangs on refresh > 0 br.set_handle_refresh(mechanize.

_http.HTTPRefreshProcessor(), max_time=1) # Want debugging messages? #br.set_debug_http(True) #br.set_debug_redirects(True) #br.set_debug_responses(True) # User-Agent (this is cheating, ok?) Br.addheaders = [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008071615 Fedora/3.0.1-1.fc9 Firefox/3.0.1')] Now you have this br object, this is your browser instance. . # Simple open? How do I get Python's Mechanize to POST an ajax request.

Web scraping: Reliably and efficiently pull data from pages that don't expect it. Paulproteus/python-scraping-code-samples.