A quick and dirty script that will suck down the Top Stories from Yahoo's page and spit them into an
  • field. That's about it. Useful for cron or sucking in via SSI pages. (Do they have an RDF/RSS anywhere?)
    • #!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use LWP::Simple;

# declare our variables for safety
my ($sawFCEnd, $sawBR, $link, $title);

# suck down the webpage
my $content = get("http://dailynews.yahoo.com/htx/ts/");

# split the content on each new line, and loop through the lines
foreach(split(/\n/, $content)) {

   # if we see FCEnd, we're getting close
   if (/<!-- FCEnd -->/) { $sawFCEnd=1; next; };

   # if we see two <br>'s on a line, we're even closer
   if ($sawFCEnd && /<br><br>/) { $sawBR=1; next; };
   
   # if we saw the two <br>'s, this must me our news
   # link, OR if the line starts with <a href=... we 
   # must have a news link too... 
   if ($sawBR or /^<a href=/) { 
      
      # clear the variables for the next loop
      $sawFCEnd=0; $sawBR=0;
     
      # grep the link and title into variables
      ($link, $title) = (/<a href="(.*)"><b>(.*)<\/b><\/a>/);

      # print a line only there's a $link
      print "<LI><A HREF=\"$link\">$title</A>\n" if defined($link);
   }

   # start over again
   next;
}

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    In reply to Quick Yahoo Top Stories Parser by Anonymous Monk

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