Re: Trying to download video from URL links

[aitap]

Well, $mech->get is an overloaded method from LWP::UserAgent which can be called as $mech->get( $uri, ':content_file' => $filename ); (quote from the WWW::Mechanize documentation). I've been using this method in my own downloader, but later decided to switch to wget to do the actual downloading. Wget gives me a progress bar and download resuming for free, without writing any additional code, and I already have it installed everywhere.

It's even considered good by "UNIX-way" philosophy to call a program which does one thing and does it well when you need this thing to be done.

[Anonymous Monk]

... :content_file ...

A few hours ago Re^2: Trying to download video from URL links the op figured it out :)

... progress bar ... additional code ...

 $lwpmechua->show_progress( 1 );

hi :)

[soulrain]

So I added the ability to pass in command line arguments: para(1): url, para(2): regex in link you are looking for, para(3): is the fileExtension you want appended onto link text

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;
use WWW::Mechanize;
my $total_args = $#ARGV + 1;
if ($total_args != 3) {
    print "usage: getLinks url regEx suffix(file type)\n";
    exit;
}
my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
my $url = $ARGV[0];
my $regEx = $ARGV[1];
my $fileType = ".".$ARGV[2];
$mech->get($url);
my @links = $mech->find_all_links( url_regex => qr#$regEx# );
for my $link(@links) {
    printf("Following: %s\n at address: %s\n", $link->text, $link->url
+);
    printf("Saving file as %s\n", $link->text.$fileType."\n");
    $mech->get($link->url, ':content_file' => $link->text.$fileType);
}

I would like to add a progress bar similar to what wget uses so could you explain a bit more about:

$lwpmechua->show_progress( 1 )?

Thanks as always!

[Anonymous Monk]

$lwpmechua is $mech in your code

[aitap]

 $lwpmechua->show_progress( 1 );

Wow. There is even WWW::Mechanize::Plugin::Retry which probably can be hacked to automatically continue partial downloads, so Mechanize eventually could replace wget.

While I have to admit that I didn't remember about show_progress, the progress bar of wget shows the percentage and ETA and the -c option automagically continues a broken download which doesn't look like a simple task in Mechanize.

[soulrain]

Ah this is true and definitely supported by software tools principle!