Client-Side Web Scripting

Once you have managed to extract the text you want and to format it to your taste, there is no reason to limit yourself to a manual use of the script, or to use it only at the console for that matter. If you want to do something else and be informed by the computer only when a new headline about Stallman appears, only three more steps are needed.

First, put the script among your cron entries (man cron will tell you everything about this). After that, add the following check to your Perl script:

if ($HTML_FILE =~ m/Stallman/) {
       # INFORM ME!!!
}

This will do what you want only if the remaining text does contain the Stallman string (or whatever else you want to know about, of course).

Next, fill the block with something like this:

open (XMSG, "|/usr/bin/X11/xmessage -title \"NEWS!\"
-file -") || die;
print XMSG $HTML_FILE;
close XMSG;

This will open a UNIX pipe to the xmessage program, which pops up a window with the title given with the corresponding switch and containing the text of the file following the -file option. In our case, “-” tells xmessage to get the text from the standard input. As it is, the Perl script will wait to exit, so that you close the xmessage window. This may or may not be what you want. In the case of a cron script, it's much better to let it start xmessage in the background on a temporary file and exit, like this:

open (XMSG, "> /tmp/gee") || die;
print XMSG $HTML_FILE;
close XMSG;
exec "/usr/bin/X11/xmessage -title \"NEWS!\"
-file /tmp/gee&";

If you want to process the page only if the content was changed since the last visit, or in the last two hours, you need the Last-Modified HTTP header. It is already available, expressed in seconds since January 1, 1970, in the third element of our @HEADER array. Hence, if you want to do something only on pages modified in the last two hours, start calculating what the time was in that moment (always in the “seconds since...” unit):

$NOW = time;
$TWO_HOURS_AGO = $NOW - (3600*2);

Then compare that time with the modification date of the web page:

if ($HEADER[2] > $TWO_HOURS_AGO) {
       # do whatever is needed
}

This is one of the rare exceptions to the do-it-yourself rule stated at the beginning: download WMHeadlines (see Resources), install it, and then configure and modify to suit your taste. Out of the box, it can fetch headlines from more than 120 sites and place them in the root menu of Blackbox, WindowMaker, Enlightenment and GNOME in such a way that you start your browser on the dynamic menu voice you click on.

Netscape can be given several commands from the prompt or any script. Such commands will cause Netscape to start if it wasn't already running or will load the requested URL in the current window, or even in a new one. However, the commands to run change depending on whether Netscape is already running. Look at the nslaunch.pl script in the WMHeadlines distribution to figure out how to check if Netscape is already running.

You also can drive Netscape to perform other actions from a script: to print a page just as Netscape would do if driven manually, make it load the page first:

exec($NETSCAPE, '-noraise', '-remote',
"openURL($URL,new-window)");

Then save it as PostScript:

exec($NETSCAPE, '-noraise', '-remote',
"saveAs(/tmp/netscape.ps,
PostScript)");

exec("mpage -PYOURPRINTER -1 /tmp/netscape.ps");

exec($NETSCAPE, '-noraise', '-remote',
"addBookmark($SOME_URL, $ITS_TITLE)");

system("/usr/bin/konqueror $URL");

Galeon can be started in an almost equal way:

system("/usr/bin/galeon $URL");

As explained in A User's Guide to Galeon (see Resources), you also can decide whether Galeon (if already running) should open the URL in a new tab:

system("/usr/bin/galeon -n $URL");

system("/usr/bin/galeon -w $URL");

system("/usr/bin/galeon -t $URL");