Get the html from a website with ruby on rails

Question

How do I get the page data of an other website somewhere on the web with ruby on rails?

Answer 1

Use Net/HTTP (for example, read this cheatsheet):

require "net/https"

http = Net::HTTP.new "google.com", 80
request = Net::HTTP::Get.new "/"
response = http.request request

p responde.code
p response.body

Answer 2

Net/HTTP is ok because it's in the standard library, but there are some cool higher-level libraries like rest-client:

RestClient.get 'http://example.com/resource', {:params => {:id => 50, 'foo' => 'bar'}}

Answer 3

You can use httparty to just get the data

Sample code (from example):

require File.join(dir, 'httparty')
require 'pp'

class Google
  include HTTParty
  format :html
end

# google.com redirects to www.google.com so this is live test for redirection
pp Google.get('http://google.com')

puts '', '*'*70, ''

# check that ssl is requesting right
pp Google.get('https://www.google.com')

Nokogiri really excels at parsing that data.. Here's some example code from the Railscast:

url = "http://www.walmart.com/search/search-ng.do?search_constraint=0&ic=48_0&search_query=batman&Find.x=0&Find.y=0&Find=Find"
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open(url))
puts doc.at_css("title").text
doc.css(".item").each do |item|
  title = item.at_css(".prodLink").text
  price = item.at_css(".PriceCompare .BodyS, .PriceXLBold").text[/\$[0-9\.]+/]
  puts "#{title} - #{price}"
  puts item.at_css(".prodLink")[:href]
end

Answer 4

I like OpenURI myself if it's just to simply get the content no fuss.

Just add require 'open-uri' to the environment and then do open('http://domain.tld/document.html').read.