SimpleCrawler for your everyday web crawling needs

Over at the standards-schmandards blog I often test websites to gather statistics on specific HTML use, accessibility and other things. Each time I have written a web crawler to collect the data. In Python and Ruby this is a simple task but last time it was like a déjà vu and I decided to create a Ruby library that I could use in the future.

SimpleCrawler is a Ruby gem that covers basic web crawling needs. Coupled with Raakt and Ruport it can be used to create a basic accessibility report for a website.

A minimal example:

require ’simplecrawler’

# Set up a new crawler
sc = SimpleCrawler::Crawler.new(“http://www.peterkrantz.com/”)

sc.crawl { |document|
# output the crawled uri
puts document.uri
}

For more details and examples see the SimpleCrawler wiki.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 27th, 2007 at 20:22 and is filed under Accessibility, Markup, Ruby. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.