From: Zach Dennis <zdennis@...>
Date: 2003-10-01T14:35:43+09:00
Subject: HTML-Parser / SGML-Parser

Ok, silly question.

I am writing a script to determine my router's WAN ip address and then to
email me once an hour in case it changes. Currently I am running a web
server at work that returns a page with the client's ip address. I need to
parse out the info on the page so I can extract the ip address of my router
when my script/program connects.

I am using the html-parser, sgml-parser and formatter ruby libraries
provided from raa and I have made the changes to the regexp regarding image
width and height. So I'm good there.

In my test.rb file I say:
------------------------------------------------
h = Net::HTTP.new('www.zachstestip.com' , 80 )
resp,data = h.get('/index.php' , nil )

w = DumbWriter.new
f = AbstractFormatter.new(w)
p = HTMLParser.new(f)
p.feed(data)
p.close
------------------------------------------------

Here comes the silly part. The function "feed" is inherited by sgml-parser
to html-parser. It passes "data" along to the sgml-parser function
"goahead". It prints everything to stdout or stderr( i dont know, but it
makes it to my screen =), but there is no print, put, etc... etc... call to
send it there!!! I cant for the life of me determine where in the feed or
goahead functions are outputting my parsed results from data! This is damn
silly of me to ask I know, but how is it getting to my CLI?

In the "goahead" function there is a giant while loop. If i place a print or
puts statement at the right before the loop and right after the loop, then
nothing is outputted( except for my explicit print/puts statements).

Am I losing it?

Zach