WWW::Mechanize treading lightly

perlmonkey2 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

This isn't so much about Mechanize as it is about being gentle with webservers. If I'm just looking to spider a domain, looking for text, when examining links for where to go next, would this be the best way to only get HTML and be gentle to the webserver: 1. Regex the links for non-html extensions, keeping everything else as a possibility. 2. HEAD $url for text/html and charset info, if is_html and a good charset/no charset. 3. GET Instead of doing the HEAD, I could just do a get, and check the header info and body for good HTML, but I thought just getting the header would be easier on the webserver even if it meant two seperate connections had to be made.

Comment on WWW::Mechanize treading lightly

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Re: WWW::Mechanize treading lightly by davidrw (Prior) on Aug 03, 2006 at 16:13 UTC
How can you make _any_ decision based upon the extension of the url?!?!? Any of these (and many others) could produce html .. you really need to look for the Content-Type. `http://perlmonks.org/?parent=565470;node_id=3333 http://example.com http://example.com/blah.html http://example.com/blah.foo http://example.com/blah.htm http://example.com/blah.php http://example.com/blah.cgi http://example.com/blah.pl http://example.com/blah.asp http://example.com/blah/foo/ http://example.com/blah.exe # even this, if someone so configured + the web server` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: WWW::Mechanize treading lightly by andyford (Curate) on Aug 03, 2006 at 16:22 UTC
Right, but I was thinking that you could at least drop .mp3, .gif, .jpeg just for an easy first cut, no?	[reply]
Re^3: WWW::Mechanize treading lightly by perlmonkey2 (Beadle) on Aug 03, 2006 at 17:09 UTC
That is exactly what I was thinking. Anyone who has their webserver configured to spit out HTML from .jpg extensions isn't a site I want to bother with. Extensions serve a purpose, and while they can be abused, that abuse would negate my need to see their text. Thanks for the input.	[reply]
Re: WWW::Mechanize treading lightly by andyford (Curate) on Aug 03, 2006 at 16:04 UTC
Since the decision between GET/HEAD would be very website dependent, looking for non-html extensions would seem the way to go. Judicious use of sleep between requests would also be a simple way to be gentle.	[reply]