Hello Monks, I'm learning to use the perl modules. As a learning step I'm interested in writing a scrapper to get articles from Hoovers once a week so I can read them offline during the weekend. I was hoping to get some design tips from more experienced coders on writing screen scrappers.

Here's what I know of the source. Hoovers keeps 30 days of articles online and displays 10 articles at a time. I can find the older article by following the link: http://hoovnews.hoovers.com/fp.asp?layout=chak&industry=Hoovers+Earnings+%26+Forecasts&starting=11&symbol=

By changing the starting=nn value, I can cycle through until a page error.

Some design decisions, I need to make:

1. How do I keep track of the articles that have already been downloaded? Should I have a simple file that keeps track of the last linked article? Or is it better to have a formatted index file that has the Link Text and the Timestamp of when it was d/led?

2. Should I use WWW::Mechanize for this or is it better to use the HTML::TableExtract and cycle through the Next link? Which is more efficient?

3. I'm thinking of creating a weekly directory so I don't have all the links in one large directory.

Any other gotchas or things to keep in mind?

In reply to Designing a web scrapper by Anonymous Monk

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