Judge_Fang 0 Report post Posted July 30, 2008 Hi all,I'd like to write a script to automate a search in order to collect data from an online database. The database is an archive of newspaper articles. The search is for certain words/text. It is searchable via a form only. The rub is that only a small portion (a month) at a time is searchable. I need to search every day for 50 years or so. Manually, this would take a considerable amount of time.I'm thinking of using perl or ruby or something similar. I am an absolute beginner with scripting and haven't done much formal learning in the subject since a pascal course many years ago in college. Of course I could just pay someone to do it, but i'd like to learn some basic scripting as I can envisage needing to do similar things quite regularly in the future.Is this feasible? Any ideas on the most efficient way to go about it? What do i need to learn in order to have a go at it? Any thoughts, tips, pointers would be greatly appreciated. Cheers Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Galahad 0 Report post Posted August 13, 2008 Well, I guess PERL would be the best choice for such searches, RegEx is a quite powerfull tool... You can connect to MySQL databases from PERL, so that shouldn't be a problem either... You should concentrate on connecting to databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, and others) in PERL, and also Regular Expressions... RegEx will be your best friend in searches for news articles... Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
