Addendum to 11th installment: Lynx; scraping credentialed web pages

Sort of a dramatized headline for what I've accomplished using the command-line Lynx  browser, but not too far from the mark. I've described in previous entries how I've used lynx to accomplish similar goals of extracting target information from web pages, so this entry is a continuation along those same lines.

I recently signed up for a prepaid cellular plan touted as being free, though it is one limited to a certain (unreasonably low, for most) number of minutes per month. The plan has thus far worked well for me. The only real issue I have come across is that I had not yet discovered any way easily to check how many minutes I've used and how many are left. The company providing the service is, of course, not very forthcoming with that sort of information: they have a vested interest in getting you to use up your free minutes, hoping thereby that you'll realize you should buy a paid plan from them, one that includes more minutes. The only way I'd found for checking current usage status is to log in to their web site and click around til you reach a page showing that data.

Of course I am generally aware of the phenomemon of web-page scraping and also have heard of python and/or perl scripts that can perform more or less automated interactions with web pages (youtube-dl being one example). So I initally thought my task would require something along these lines--quite the tall order for someone such as myself, knowing next to nothing about programming in either python or perl. But then I ran across promising information that led me to believe I might well be able to accomplish this task using the tried and true lynx browser, and some experimentation proved that this would, indeed, allow me to realize my goal.

The information I discovered came from this page. There is found a description of how it is possible to record to a log file all keystrokes entered into a particular lynx browsing session--something reminiscent of the way I used to create macros under Microsoft Word when I was using that software years ago. The generated log file can then, in turn, be fed to a subsequent lynx session, effectively automating certain browsing tasks, such as logging into a site, navigating to, then printing (to a file, in my case) a page. Add a few other utilities like cron, sed, and mail, and I have a good recipe for getting the cellular information I need into an e-mail that gets delivered to my inbox on a regular basis.

The initial step was to create the log file. An example of the command issued is as follows:

lynx -cmd_log=/tmp/mysite.txt http://www.mysite.com.

That, of course, opens the URL specified in lynx. The next step is to enter such keystrokes are are necessary to get to the target page. In my case, I needed to press the down arrow key a few times to reach the login and password entry blanks. I then typed in the credentials, hit the down arrow again, then the "enter" key to submit the credentials. I then needed to hit the "end" key on the next page, which took me all the way to the bottom of that page, then the up arrow key a couple of times to get to the link leading to the target page. Once I got to the target page, I pressed the "p" key (for print), then the "enter" key (for print to file), at which point I was prompted for a file name. Once I'd entered the desired file name and pressed the "enter" key again, I hit the "q" key to exit lynx. In this way, I produced the log file I could then use for a future automated session at that same site. Subsequent testing using the command

lynx -cmd_script=mysite.txt http://www.mysite.com

confirmed that I had, in fact, a working log file that could be used for retreiving the desired content from the target page.

The additional steps for my scenario were to turn this into a cron job (no systemd silliness here!), use sed to strip out extraneous content from the beginning and end of the page I'd printed/retrieved, and to get the resulting material into the body of an e-mail that I would have sent to myself at given intervals. The sed/mail part of this goes something like

sed -n 24,32p filename | mail -s prepaid-status me@mymail.com*

* I can't go into particulars of the mail program here, but suffice to say at least that you need a properly edited configuration file for your mail sending utility (I use msmtp) for this to work.

14th installment: home-brewed WOD by e-mail daily

I used to subscribe to an on-line dictionary's word-of-the-day (WOD) program. That entailed signing up, using a valid e-mail address, on their web site so that they would, each day, send a different WOD along with its definition to that address. The service proved to be a bit flaky, however, and the e-mails would sometimes get caught up in my spam filter. So, somewhere along the line--perhaps owing to an e-mail address change--I stopped receiving those educational e-mails.

I'd had in the back of my mind going back to using that service but hadn't signed up again--all the while having a nagging suspicion that it must be possible, using open source tools, to cobble together some way of doing this sort of thing from my own computer, thereby obviating the need to sign up for some service. But could I, with my modest technical acumen, actually pull this off? Read on to find out the result.

Meantime, as I've continued learning my way around GNU/Linux and computing in general, I made some headway in learning how to use the program remind to help me keep track of scheduled appointments and to-do items, even progressing so far as puzzling out how to get my computer to e-mail me my schedule on a regular basis. Perhaps I'll write more about that accomplishment--of which I'm quite proud--in a future entry.

The relevance of that observation to the present post is that I learned how to use the program mail, along with the small msmtp, for sending--when triggered by cron--to myself automated reminder e-mails from my system. So some major ingredients were actually already in place that would allow me finally to implement my own, home-brewed WOD-by-e-mail solution.

This was perhaps the final piece of the puzzle for me, although another crucial piece had been under my nose recently as well, something I ran across while investigating bash functions (I wrote about that a few installments earlier, as you can see here). By adapting one of the bash functions I'd found, I was first able to see the WOD from the command line by simply issuing wod from a command prompt. But I soon began forgetting to do that, which spurred me to consider once again having the WOD somehow e-mailed to me.

Finally, putting two and two together, I realized I could adapt the thrust of that function to my needs by having its output placed into the body of an e-mail that would be automatically sent to me each day at 6 A.M. Following is a description of how I did that.

A key ingredient I have not yet mentioned is the text-mode browser lynx, which produces an html file that gets parsed for material that will be inserted into the e-mail body: and I didn't mention it because lynx and me go back a long, long ways--clear back to the close of the twentieth century, to be precise. The line, swiped straight from the bash function I found on the web, is as follows: lynx -dump http://www.wordthink.com/. That simply "dumps the formatted output of the default document or those specified on the command line to standard output," as the man page tells us--obviously not enough to get a WOD into an e-mail body, but fairly close.

What's needed, then, is, like the bash function, to pipe that output through grep, searching for a certain pattern, then to extract from it the relevant lines which belong in the body of the e-mail. Those results then get piped to mail, which inserts the lines into the body of an e-mail. Below is the full line that I inserted into my crontab file, minus the bit that tells the line to be executed at 6 A.M. daily:

lynx -dump -nonumbers "http://www.wordthink.com/" | grep -A 10 -m 1 "Today's Word of the Day" | mail -s WOD my-addy@my-mail.com

This cron entry tells lynx to dump the page found at the specified link to standard output (whatever that means), then to pipe that through grep, searching for the phrase "Today's Word of the Day." Once that phrase is found, grep is to stop searching (the -m 1 switch--it's to look for only one instance) and to "print" the ten lines preceding (the -A 10 switch), which actually then get piped to mail and become the body of the message. The -s switch specifies what the subject line of the e-mail should be. The -nonumbers switch just tells lynx not to preface the links it finds in the page with numerals between square brackets, which it would otherwise do.

That's about it for this entry. I really do need to write up a remind entry, since I had hoped long and hard to find some scheduling utility that would be no-frills, yet powerful enough to issue me reminders on a regular basis. So that may be next on the agenda for this blog.

Some afterthoughts: piping the output of lynx -dump through grep to extract target text is not ideal, since--if I've read its man page correctly--you are limited to extracting text by line. A problem arises here because the number of lines for the target entries for the WOD can vary day-by-day. As a result, it is likely that either extraneous line(s) will be included on many days, or that some target line(s) will get cut off on other days. Perhaps piping the lynx -dump output through sed or awk--which, as I understand it are both far more flexible when it comes to identifying target text--might be a better solution. But because I am not well-versed in either of those utilities and because extracting the WOD from web sites whose layout may change at any time is a moving target, I am presently not attempting to improve on the method I've described here. I do, on the other hand, welcome suggestions for improving this WOD-by-e-mail solution from any reader who may know those--grep included--or other utilities better than I.