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#Creating a CLI tool with Ruby/Nokogiri

A common task for programmers is to make CLI (command-line interface) tools or scripts for various tasks. Usually, these CLI tools will ask users for input, process the input, and give output. We've been using rails and rake, which are CLI tools for manging our Rails apps.

To practice data scraping, we're going to create a CLI tool to "acquire" some data from a site.

##Requirements

This is a fairly open-ended assignment. The goal is to create a command line tool that will take some input and return some data from a website. Some suggested sources are below, but you can scrape any site you'd like.

####Suggested sources

  • Horoscope
    • input: astrological sign
    • output: the horoscope for that sign
    • source: astrology.com
  • Weather
    • input: City / Location
    • output: The current weather in that city
    • source: weather.gov
  • Celebrity Gossip
    • input: Name of a celebrity
    • output: Headline(s) about that person
    • source: tmz.com
  • Product Review
    • input: Name of a product
    • output: The product review / rating
    • source: cnet.com/reviews
  • Movie rating

##Suggested Process

  • Fork and clone this repository.
  • Go to the site and figure out how you (as a human) would access this data
  • Open the console in the browser and use inspect element and document.querySelector to find the elements you want to access
  • Copy the url and use curl to download a test file of data
  • Use nokogiri to get the data you need from the HTML (using the query selectors you already tested in the browser)
  • Use rest-client to load a live url
  • Use gets.chomp or ARGV to take input
  • Create an alias to make the CLI tool easy to use (optional)

Licensing

  1. All content is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
  2. All software code is licensed under GNU GPLv3. For commercial use or alternative licensing, please contact [email protected].