Janko in a Jar

Image via WikipediaI will soon need to make some sort of web-spider. It seems to me that a very good choice for making one is REBOL. I was programming in REBOL years ago so I forgot most of things. REBOL recently released a very much awaited version 3 (I was a little afraid it is more of a “vaporware” ), and after few years showed that Carl Sassenrath still “means business” with it. So my interest in this interesting language is renoved too. Another big plus is that 3.0 greatly solves some issues that I had with the original REBOL (general closeness, artif. limits in Core version, async stuff). I decided to make a quick video of the procedure so that I get you interested in this excellent language too. Yes you, who did you think I was talking about

I do the following in the video: I load a webpage of a “last 100 motorbike ads” thru HTTP, I parse the unnecesarry html away first then I parse the table that holds the ads into separate rows first and then each row into concrete data.

Interesting tidbits: do you see how I don’t enquote http address (REBOL has many datatypes and URL is one of them) or XML tags (the same reason). Most of the time I just use the parse word which moves me into parse DIALECT. Most languages have functions, classes but rebol also has dialects. parse dialect is just one of them and you can create your own as you can create your own functions for example.

I used only the most basic features of parse dialect here. It’s an unbelievably powerfull feture.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 19th, 2008 at 1:08 am and is filed under Just programming, rebol.