The first is assuming the new page you fetch will not be served up from cache some place.

That's not the problem of my solution. :) It should have access to two copies of the site from different times to compare them. :) Validating that content was not supplied from the cache or something, is either user's headache or yet another addon to the script. :)

It would also be a problem if the overall content of the page was the same, but something like the <date> was different every day. Of course, this can be argued both ways, but one must assume that changed is subjective and not objective.

Well, that was one of the reasons I suggested the use of Text::Diff from the very beginning, since it will minimize the headache. You'll be able to quickly grep away things like dates. :)

I would probably roll my own very much like you have suggested. Since the number of pages to track could get large, I would probably store the MD5 sum and the URL in a database and that's it.

You could always start away with the hash like: 

my %internet = 
   (
     'url' => 'md5 checksum',
   );

[download]

Thanks for the feedback anyway. :)

Leonid Mamtchenkov aka TVSET

In reply to Re: Re: Re: questions concerning using perl to monitor webpages by TVSET
in thread questions concerning using perl to monitor webpages by Anonymous Monk

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