Validate Approach for WebPage comparison, please

Scripting Forums AppleScript | Mac OS X
,
#1

Good day.

I’m new to AS and in thinking about practical exercises I could use to explore and learn, one which came to mind is to write a reminder script. I have a habit of forgetting to go to the newstand every 3 months to purchase a quarterly publication and since the actual release date is sometime within the middle month of each quarter, I wondered if AS could take care of this for me…

The publisher has this HTML code on the front page of their website:

Current issue: Spring 2009
NOW ON STANDS!

View Cover
<a

the issue currently available is embedded in this HTML in two separate places:
Current issue: XXXXXXX
covers.pl?issue=sp09

psuedo code:

– run this script every day if month is middle month of a calendar quarter(i.e. Feb, May, Aug, Nov)
– compare the value for current issue available to the value of a variable from the most recent script execution (no idea how to have a previous result compared to current result)
– if the value of the string has changed, display a dialog which states “Issue should be available at borders in the next couple of days”

thoughts/comments?

Not to appear ungracious, but at this point, I’m not looking for any code suggestions, just comments on the basic approach. I’m sure that I’ll be back for suggestions/please for help with syntax, etc, but I learn better if I have to work through the issues from scratch ~

In advance…

#2

Hi,

assuming that the website contains plain html text, the string covers.pl?issue= appears only once in the text
and there is no line break character in the line, you can try something like this


set t to do shell script "curl 'http://myWebsite.com' | grep 'covers.pl?issue='"

set {TID, text item delimiters} to {text item delimiters, "Current issue: "}
set searchResult to text item 2 of t
set currentIssue to stripText(searchResult, "<") --> currentIssue contains "Spring 2009"
set text item delimiters to "covers.pl?issue="
set searchResult to text item 2 of t
set issue to stripText(searchResult, "\"") --> issue contains "sp09"
set text item delimiters to {""}

on stripText(t, v)
	return text 1 thru ((offset of v in t) - 1) of t
end stripText
#3

Stefan ~

many thanks for the late night suggestion…

I’ll start building the script tonight and revert with my progress (assuming there is some :slight_smile: )