Trying to download files using WWW::Mechanize

ruby-talk
1

Your last post actually led to a solution, but this still helps me as it
narrows down the links I have to traverse.

Thanks again!

Dan

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-----Original Message-----
From: Aaron Patterson [mailto:aaron_patterson@speakeasy.net]
Sent: Tuesday, May 30, 2006 1:00 PM
To: ruby-talk ML
Subject: Re: Trying to download files using WWW::Mechanize

Hey Dan.

On Wed, May 31, 2006 at 03:16:45AM +0900, Berger, Daniel wrote:
> How do I grab a particular file and load it into memory or onto the
> local filesystem? I tried using the 'text' method (based on the
> examples file) but that didn't seem to work for me.
>

I misread the question the first time, so I'll try again!
The text method helps you match the text displayed. For
example, a url that looks like this:

<a href="http://google.com">Hello World!</a>

Would be found like this:

  page.links.text('Hello World!').first

Mechanize returns an array because there could be multiple
links that have that text. You can also use a regular
expression like this:

  page.links.text(/Hello World!/).first

Or, say you need to find all files whose 'href' ends in
'.csv', you could do this:

  page.links.href(/\.csv$/).each { |link|
    puts agent.click(link).body
  }

Hope this helps!