The blog has moved to http://jessehouse.com/ ... Many google searches point here so I am leaving it operational, but there will be no new posts.
Showing posts with label scRUBYt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label scRUBYt. Show all posts

Saturday, September 27, 2008

scRUBYt

I needed to do some screen scrapping using Ruby, so after a few google searches I came across this post which looked very promising, after a quick scan through the comments scRUBYt looked even better.

stumbling block #1: well it did take me a bit to get it installed, turns out it is currently (0.3.4) hard-wired to use RubyInline 3.6.3, but I had RubyInLine 3.7.0 installed, this post gives the details to work around this issue, otherwise you will get an error something like Gem::Exception: can't activate RubyInline (= 3.6.3), already activated RubyInline-3.7.0].


stumbling block #2: trying the simple example for scrapping google here I got the following error -  can't convert Hash into String. So I tried commenting out some of the code, just limiting it to hit the submit button, the result - no error but no output either? after looking around on the scRUBYt forums turns out scRUBYt logging is not on by default, so turn it on... Scrubyt.logger = Scrubyt::Logger.new and run the code again [ERROR] No extractor defined, exiting... ok, so un-comment the code and run it again now that I have the logging on, same error, I am obviously doing something wrong? try a couple other code samples, more fun error messages - The error occurred while evaluating nil.example_type.

Well it turns out I was jumping ahead because I was calling this code from inside a Rake task. After moving the code into a regular ruby file and calling it using ruby instead of rake everything works just great! I did not look into why this code is failing from inside the rake task but I am guessing there is some conflict with the libraries? an exercise for another day...