As you've already said, they probably won't like a flood of automated requests, so it's best to see if the site has some terms of service that you should follow so that they don't block you or worse.

Keeping that in mind, it sounds like WWW::Mechanize might be able to help you - or, for a fixed URL, plain old LWP::Simple should work, since it sounds like basically what you want to do is refresh the page multiple times and then compare the versions. Once you've got the HTML, something like HTML::FormatText could give you the text-only version, which could be diffed using something like Text::Diff (disclaimer: I haven't used these latter two modules, just found them via a quick search). Or, you could get the structure of the HTML via something like HTML::TreeBuilder and implement the extraction and comparison yourself.


In reply to Re: Web Have Your Say diff log by Anonymous Monk
in thread Web Have Your Say diff log by mr_market

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.