Re^4: Web::Magic 0.005

[tobyink]

[App::scrape] does support RDF.

No, it does not. Accepting XML does not count as supporting RDF. In general, RDF cannot be effectively processed with XML tools.

Web::Magic won't help me "fake" a proper ua_string like WWW::Mechanize , and it has all those exceptions, but no cookie jar?

Web::Magic lets you specify any user agent string you like. The POD for the "set_request_header" method shows two examples of how to do precisely that:

$magic->set_request_header('User-Agent', 'MyBot/0.1');
$magic->User_Agent('MyBot/0.1');  # same as above

And if you have a cookie jar you'd like to use:

$magic->user_agent->cookie_jar($cookies);

HTML::Query, Web::Query, Web::Scraper, Web::Magic ... a lot of the same kind of work, which horse to choose?

Sell me a horse?

Selecting stuff via CSS selectors is only a very small part of what Web::Magic does. (I almost regret using that feature in my first example.) Web::Magic aims to be the swiss army knife of HTTP-addressable resources. Whether it's a classic web page, a RESTful API, an Atom feed, or a WebDAV fileshare, Web::Magic can probably make dealing with it easier.

Let's suppose you have a RESTful API which supports up XML and JSON, depending on the request's HTTP Accept header. Web::Magic notices how you're trying to access the data, and does what you mean...

Web::Magic->new('http://example.com/new-document')
  ->POST($xmldom)
  ->{entry}{id};

It's smart enough to figure out the HTTP headers you want:

POST /new-document HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
Content-Type: application/xml
Accept: application/json, text/x-yaml

<xmldoc>...</xmldoc>

But if you'd called it like this:

my @entries =
  Web::Magic->new('http://example.com/new-document')
    ->POST({ title => "Hello", foo => 1 })
    ->entries;
print $entries[0]->id;

Then the request would be more like:

POST /new-document HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Accept: application/atom+xml, application/rss+xml

title=Hello&foo=1

[Anonymous Monk]

Web::Magic lets you specify any user agent string you like.

Um, yes, that is the problem, it doesn't help me concoct the correct string like Mechanize , its bare bones/vanilla LWP::UserAgent. With mechanize I use  $ua->agent_alias('Mac Mozilla'); or "Windows Mozilla", I don't have to go digging for the full string.

 

Hat for your horse sir WWW::UserAgent::Random?