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Scripting in Perl

This scripting language is not available by default any more. To use it you will need to edit the AllowUnstableWindowsFeatures in the screen-scraper.properties file.

Overview

screen-scraper uses ActiveState's ActivePerl library for scripts written in Perl. Using Perl within screen-scraper can only be done on a Windows platform, and requires that the ActivePerl runtime be installed.

screen-scraper will automatically detect if the ActivePerl runtime is installed, which you can see by selecting a script from objects tree in the workbench and clicking on the Language drop-down. If you don't see Perl in the list then the runtime needs to be installed.

The ActivePerl runtime can be downloaded from ActiveState's download page for free.

Example

Java classes can be instantiated within a script using the CreateBean function. For example, the following script will instantiate a RunnableScrapingSession for the "Weather" scraping session (which is found in the default screen-scraper installation) and run it:

# This particular example will only work with professional and enterprise editions of screen-scraper
# RunnableScrapingSession is reserved for these editions

# Generate a new "Weather" scraping session.
$runnableScrapingSession = CreateBean( "com.screenscraper.scraper.RunnableScrapingSession", "Weather" );

# Put the zip code in a session variable so we can reference it later.
$runnableScrapingSession->setVariable( "ZIP_CODE", "90001" );

# Tell the scraping session to scrape.
$runnableScrapingSession->scrape();

scraper on 07/16/2010 at 4:27 pm