a WWW::Robot robot ?

[pnguine]

Hi I'm tyring to make myself a robot to look for things on the web in a more specific manner than google, etc. I'm using borrowed code to start as I don't know much about this and there doesn't seem to be much on the net about it. This is the code so far:

#!perl
#ORIG#  SMiTZ's Big Bad Support Crawler
#ORIG# crawls support.intel.com, reading title and meta description ta
+gs,
#ORIG# storing these in a lovely database.
#
# v0.1

use strict;
use warnings;
use WWW::Robot;
#ORIG# use DBI;    #probably use this later
#ORIG# use Data::Dumper;    #think it goes with the above

#ORIG# my $docRoot = 'http://support.inte­l.com';   #see next line
my $docRoot = 'http://www.linuxjournal.com/';
my $databaseName = 'spider1';     #leave here, it shouldn't be a probl
+em
my $databaseTable = 'index';           #see above


# Connect to DB

# my $dbh = DBI->connect("DBI:OD­BC:$databaseName", {RaiseError=>1}) o
+r die ("Couldn\'t connect to database: $DBI::errstr; stopped");

my $robot = new WWW::Robot(    'NAME' =>    'penguine Bot',
               'VERSION' =>    0.1,
               'EMAIL' =>    '[e-mail]',
               'VERBOSE' =>    0,        #NAUGHTY BOY!!! Change ASAP
               'DELAY' =>    0,
               'IGNORE_TEXT' =>    0);        
#ORIG# $robot->proxy('http'­, 'http://***.***.inte­l.com:911');    # d
+amn firewall  probably not needed

$robot->addHook('follow-url-test', \&follow_url_test);
$robot->addHook('invoke-on-contents', \&invoke_on_contents);

$robot->run($docRoot);
#ORIG# $dbh->disconnect();



#-------------------­--------------------­--------------------­-------
+-------------­------------
# Hook subs

sub follow_url_test {
   my ($robot, $hook, $url) = @_;
   return 0 unless $url->scheme eq 'http';
   return 0 if $url =~ /\.(gif|jpg|png|xbm|au|wav|mpg|doc|xml|ppt)$/;
   return $url =~ /^$docRoot/;
   
}

sub invoke_on_contents {
   my ($robot, $hook, $url, $response, $structure) = @_;
   return unless $response->content_type eq 'text/html';
   my $desc = $response->header("X­-meta-keywords");
   $desc = 'none, none, none, none, none' unless ($desc);
   my $title = $response->header("title");
   my @desc = split(/,/, $desc);

   # the following block is an attempt at pod syntax

  # =head1 COMMENTS

   # $dbh->do(q{
   #    INSERT INTO index (url, title, description1, description2, des
+cription3, description4, description5)
   #    VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?)
   # }, undef, $url, $title, $desc[0], $desc[1], $desc[2], $desc[3], $
+desc[4])
   #    or die $dbh->errstr;
   
   # =cut

   print "*";
   
}   # I'll try my first run like this and see what happens - how do I 
+make this executable in windoze?

....... I get this error when I try to run it:

WWW::Robot: failed to create User Agent object: LWP::RobotUA from address required at E:/Perl/site/lib/WWW/Robot.pm line 1160

Can't call method "addHook" on an undefined value at myrobot.pl line 32.

Thanks for any help - I'm lost at this point. BTW - Win98/ActivePerl

[castaway]

A first glance at WWW::Robot shows that it hasnt been updated since 1997, LWP has, however.. I downloaded and tested it (there are no 'make test' tests, silly module), there is however an example program, which also does not run. I ran it through perl debug, it seems that WWW::Robot attempts to create a new LWP::RobotUA object, passing it 'NAME' and 'FROM' as parameters, the LWP::RobotUA requires that the second parameter, which is supposed to be an email address, contain an @ sign, so it dies.

In short, WWW::Robot is broken. This has already been reported on the CPAN bug tracker, but not yet fixed, see: here.

(oops, my mistake, WWW::Robot has a newer version, last released in Nov 2002, but that is still broken.)

C.

[Anonymous Monk]

Thanks very much - being of the uninitiated I would have been tearing my hair out for weeks trying to get it to go.

Any suggestions on another direction to take to do the same thing with perl?

Phil N

[lampros21_7]

Hi By accident i was looking at someone 's code who had used WWW::Robot to make it do something and his code magically worked(http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/WebTechniques/col42.html)

I realized that he was also using "USERAGENT => LWP::UserAgent->new," when creating an instance of the WWW::Robot. Am not sure if this really works cause i havent writtenm any more code to test for sure(am off for sleep now anyway :)) but it has taken the error message the user above was writing about which i was getting too. Hopefully this is right.