Hello perlmonks,

I am trying to use WWW::Mechanize to build a crawler so that it is able to crawl a (large) set of webpages and able to pull out all the pdfs that each webpage hosts.

I am running into some trouble with crawling relative links out of webpages. Some webpages have only "relative" links for certain types of files, and my crawler does not get them right.

I use Mechanize to retrieve the base URL ($mech->base()) and then append it to the HREF entry of the PDF but that does not seem to work either.

I am writing the crawler for doing crawls internally, but here's one example webpage on WWW that would be a case in point: http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/53720 So the question is how do I adapt my crawler to crawl PDFs from such webpages?

Any suggestions will be very gratefully appreciated.

Thank you.

Andy

PS: By the way, I tried using HTML::LinkExtor also, and it does not work either. It does not produce "right" URL for the PDF. It again appends the "base" URL to the relative URL just as I did manually with Mechanize above.

In reply to Crawling Relative Links from Webpages by listanand

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.