I am not trying to do anything malicious or hammer sites. All I really wanted to do was download the Alabama City list from wikipedia, once, and parse it correctly :o)

I decided to do it as a learning experience in Perl web scraping. But if you connect to wikipedia with Web::Scrape it refuses a connection with "bad host name" or "invalid user agent" ect... Scrappy was supposed to let you tweak the user_agent, which is why I chose that package but so far no one really knows how... I could have easily copied and pasted the information long before now. But that is not as challenging and time consuming, or fun. I enjoy solving challenges with Perl. It is truly the work horse of the Internet.

Thanks for all the tips. I may look into some of the other examples posted here. Scrappy looks promising but I think I need to work with an established method rather than an emerging one at this point. :)

In reply to Re: Scrappy user_agent error by docster
in thread Scrappy user_agent error by docster

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