I’m a retired Unix sysadmin. Over the years I’ve built things in COBOL, FORTAN, C, perl, rexx, PHP, visual basic, various Unix shells and maybe others. Nothing has been a real “application” - mostly just utilities to help me get things done.
Now that I’m retired, and it’s cold outside, I’m curious to try some more coding - and I have an idea.
The music communities here seem to post links to YouTube. I generally use Lemmy on my phone but don’t use YouTube, or listen to music, on my phone if I can help it. I’d like to scrape a music community here and add the songs posted to a playlist in my musicbrainz account.
Does that sound like a reasonable learner project? Any suggestions for language and libraries appreciated. My preferred IDE is vim on bash and I have a home server running Linux where this could run as a daemon, or be scheduled.
Indeed. while my bash-fu is redimentary at best, I don’t think Bash can be used for web scrapping ? But I think he could use RSS to get the posts, then extract youtube links with Regex and use the dump feature of yt-dlp* to get the video category, title,etc by using jq to parse the json. Then, it’s probably just a matter of using curl to do the API calls and voilà.
*yt-dlp is better maintained than youtube-dl, or so I heard.
I built two scrapers for a website that hosts images and videos using bash.
They’re educational, I swear! /s
I looked through the html and figured out regexes for their media. The scripts will parse all the links on the thumbnail pages and then load the corresponding primary pages with curl. On those pages, it then uses wget to grab the file. Some additional pattern matching names the file to the name of the post.
It’s probably convoluted, but you can accomplish a lot in bash if you want to.
Man, there’s something really wrong with lemmy lately. I only got the notification for your comment 8 days after you sent it. It’s the third time this happens but this must be the longest time before the notification reaches me.
Yes, there’s a discussion about this on my instance. Someone there provided a link to where this was getting addressed. Some aspects of federation have been broken for a bit.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4288#issuecomment-1878442186
Hope it get fixed soon.
Seems like it. My inbox had five replies yesterday (after >1w of only local replies). Today, even more. Yesterday, the GUI was partially broken. Today looks normal.