From: 7stud -- <bbxx789_05ss@...>
Date: 2008-01-27T13:42:18+09:00
Subject: Re: Extracting Data from a Webpage

Tj Superfly wrote:
> Hello everyone.
> 
> I was wondering if anyone knew a way to extract the web page title off
> of a specific URL that you input into a program?
> 
> I give it the URL, say www.google.com. It then gives me "Google" - it's
> title.
> 
> Then also, is there anyway that the program could extract the next 5
> characters - after a certain phrase that doesn't change on the webpage?
> 
> Thanks for your help in advance!

You can do something like this:

require 'open-uri'

url = "http://www.google.com"

open(url) do |f|
  f.each do |line|
    if md_obj = /<title>(.*)<\/title>/.match(line)
      puts md_obj[1]
    end

    if md_obj = /type=(.{6})/.match(line)
      puts md_obj[1]
    end

  end
end

Ruby also has various html parsing libraries that allow you to search 
html documents by tag name, tag position, etc.
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