File Creation/Loop Problems in Ruby

Question

EDIT: My original question was way off, my apologies. Mark Reed has helped me find out the real problem, so here it is.

Note that this code works:

require 'rubygems'
require 'nokogiri'
require 'open-uri'

source_url = "www.flickr.com"
puts "Visiting #{source_url}"
page = Nokogiri::HTML(open("http://website/script.php?value=#{source_url}"))
textarea = page.css('textarea') 


filename = source_url.to_s + ".txt"
create_file = File.open("#{filename}", 'w')
create_file.puts textarea
create_file.close

Which is really awesome, but I need it to do this to ~110 URLs, not just Flickr. Here's my loop that isn't working:

require 'rubygems'
require 'nokogiri'
require 'open-uri'

File.open('sources.txt').each_line do |source_url|
  puts "Visiting #{source_url}"
  page = Nokogiri::HTML(open("http://website/script.php?value=#{source_url}"))
  textarea = page.css('textarea') 

  filename = source_url.to_s + ".txt"
  create_file = File.open("#{filename}", 'w')
  create_file.puts "#{textarea}"
  create_file.close
end

What am I doing wrong with my loop?

The correct syntax is File.open(variable, 'w'). what is the contents of variable? — Mark Reed
– Mark Reed, Commented May 5, 2012 at 1:43
What is the value when it fails, though? Can you create a file with that name in that folder via other means? — Mark Reed
– Mark Reed, Commented May 5, 2012 at 2:15
I believe it's "www.flickr.com". Creating "www.flickr.com.txt" works perfectly fine manually. — Stn
– Stn, Commented May 5, 2012 at 2:17
but there's no '.txt' above. try just doing File.open("www.flickr.com","w") from irb and see what you get. I suspect Windows just doesn't like that as a filename. But if that works, it's probably time for a chat instead of more comments. — Mark Reed
– Mark Reed, Commented May 5, 2012 at 2:28

Mark Reed · Accepted Answer · 2012-05-05 04:05:18Z

1

Ok, now you're looping over the lines of the input file. When you do that, you get strings that end in a newilne. So you're trying to create a file with a newline in the middle of its name, which is not legal in Windows.

Just chomp the string:

File.open('sources.txt').each_line do |source_url|
  source_url.chomp!
  # ... rest of code goes here ...

You can also use File#foreach instead of File#open.each_line:

File.foreach('sources.txt') do |source_url|
  source_url.chomp!
  # ... rest of code goes here

edited May 5, 2012 at 4:05

answered May 5, 2012 at 3:58

Mark Reed

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1 Comment

Mark Reed Over a year ago

Low-tech way to debug these sorts of problems is just to add puts - you were printing out the URL, but you would have seen the problem right away if you printed out the actual entire filename right before the open call.

d11wtq · Accepted Answer · 2012-05-05 01:43:34Z

0

You're putting your parentheses in the wrong place:

create_file = File.open(variable, 'w')

answered May 5, 2012 at 1:43

d11wtq

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1 Comment

Stn Over a year ago

Thanks. Changed. Still getting the same error though. Edited post to contain full code, maybe this isn't the issue.

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