Posts on web scraping

Scraping the New Zealand Whitepages with Ruby

a post by Peter Hollows about web scraping and useful gems.

In New Zealand, telcos don’t expose their directories sensibly to the public, so if your script needs to look up numbers for a given name there is no RESTful API. Instead, these companies provide us the data in a challenging HTML format; this is because they are nice and want to give us a fun scripting project. Web-scraping means parsing ...