Hi dear All,

I am trying to build a text corpus from a blog.

I have downloaded the whole site locally and removed all the files I wouldn't need, so I am left just with the html pages containing the posts (pure text, just the post: that's what I want at the end).

What follows is the smallest and cleanest code I have: 

#scrape beppegrillo.it
############################################################
#!/usr/bin/perl;
use utf8;
use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Find;
use HTML::Tree;
use LWP::Simple;
############################################################
#set the working directory where the html files are
############################################################
my $dir = "CORPUS/2005/01/";
my $url;
#############################################################
#call a sub routine in order to operate on each file in the directory
############################################################
find(\&edit, $dir);
#
############################################################
#specifica cosa deve fare la subroutine edit
############################################################
sub edit() {
############################################################
#check that what you're working on is a file and not a directory; chec
+k that is an html file
############################################################
    my $file = $_;
    if ((-e $file) && (! -d $file) && (/.html?/)){    
############################################################
#open filehandle in order to read
############################################################
    open (FH, "<",$file) || die $!;
############################################################
#build the tree or die
############################################################
    my $tree = HTML::Tree->new();
    $tree->parse_file($file) || die $!;
############################################################
#get the main div, the one that contains the post and print it as html
############################################################
    my $getmaindiv = $tree->look_down(_tag => "div",id  => "post_princ
+ipale") || die $!;
    print $getmaindiv->as_HTML, "\n";    
    close FH;
############################################################
#
############################################################
    }
}

[download]

Now, it more or less works. I've been able with this code to get what I want. I had to add some more lines (but just a few, in order to get only the <p> inside the main <div> tag) but it did the work.

So, I would like to try a different approach. I would like to pile up all the code and get the most frequent sequence of tag, so to statistically identify what is NOT pure post text.

I've seen HTML::ExtractMain which should use the Readability algorithm but it doesn't seem to work.

Do you guys think that what I trying to do is possibile in a few lines of code?

At the moment I only can get all the html code togeather, but I would like to have it line by line, so that then some frequency list could be possible.

Any idea?

In reply to Scrape a blog: a statistical approach by epimenidecretese

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


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