urlwatch - Online in the Cloud

PROGRAM:

NAME

urlwatch - Watch web pages and arbitrary URLs for changes

SYNOPSIS

urlwatch [options]

DESCRIPTION

urlwatch watches a list of URLs for changes and prints out unified diffs of the changes.
You can filter always-changing parts of websites by providing a "hooks.py" script.

OPTIONS

--version
show program's version number and exit

-h, --help
show the help message and exit

-v, --verbose
Show debug/log output

--urls=FILE
Read URLs from the specified file

--hooks=FILE
Use specified file as hooks.py module

-e, --display-errors
Include HTTP errors (404, etc..) in the output

ADVANCED FEATURES

urlwatch includes some advanced features that you have to activate by creating a hooks.py
file that specifies for which URLs to use a specific feature. You can also use the
hooks.py file to filter trivially-varying elements of a web page.

ICALENDAR FILE PARSING
This module allows you to parse .ics files that are in iCalendar format and provide a very
simplified text-based format for the diffs. Use it like this in your hooks.py file:

from urlwatch import ical2txt

def filter(url, data):
if url.endswith('.ics'):
return ical2txt.ical2text(data).encode('utf-8') + data
# ...you can add more hooks here...
return data

HTML TO TEXT CONVERSION
There are three methods of converting HTML to text in the current version of urlwatch:
"lynx" (default), "html2text" and "re". The former two use command-line utilities of the
same name to convert HTML to text, and the last one uses a simple regex-based tag
stripping method (needs no extra tools). Here is an example of using it in your hooks.py
file:

from urlwatch import html2txt

def filter(url, data):
if url.endswith('.html') or url.endswith('.htm'):
return html2txt.html2text(data, method='lynx')
# ...you can add more hooks here...
return data

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