Hi Monks

The website I am trying to scrape from has some links which can't be followed because of a server issue, when I iterate through the links on the page the prgram crashes because of these 'down links'. What is the best way of testing these links first before I follow them and extract the URL?

An example of teh doen link is as follows: http://www.molmovdb.org/cgi-bin/motion.cgi?ID=ppar

Would I need Test::WWW::Mechanize to test before following? Also is it possible to iterate the get($url) in a loop for the links, everything I've tried so far does'nt allow me to do so, it wants an absolute URL?

Using the following code: 


#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use WWW::Mechanize;
use Storable;

my $mech_cgi = WWW::Mechanize->new;

$mech_cgi->get( 'http://www.molmovdb.org/cgi-bin/browse.cgi' );

my @cgi_links = $mech_cgi->find_all_links( url_regex => qr/motion.cgi/
+ );

for(my $i = 0; $i < @cgi_links; $i++) { 
    print "following link: ", $cgi_links[$i]->url, "\n";
    $mech_cgi->follow_link( url => $cgi_links[$i]->url )
      or die "Error following link ", $cgi_links[$i]->url;

$mech_cgi->back;

}

[download]

many thanks and best wishes

Dan

In reply to conditional testing for error 500 webpages before following them? by fraizerangus

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