Dash? $50? Seriously, when are you going to get a Mac and Quicksilver?
So it’s that obvious then, huh? Ok, I admit it. I’m insanely jealous of Quicksilver and I’ve never even used it. I’m just holding on to the hope that someone will perfect a Windows analog some day.
After updating BBQueue for the 3rd time to fix it to work with changes to Blockbuster’s site, I decided that there’s got to be a better way to go than regular expressions for pulling the data from their pages. Regular expressions are super handy and great for a lot of things, but handling HTML whose structure might change at any time without notice isn’t one of them. What I really needed was an HTML parser, and having been greatly impressed with Hpricot for Ruby I set out to find a similar library for Javascript. However, I came up empty handed. In the process though I came across any number of Javascript XML parsers and it dawned on me that, hey if I’m lucky and Blockbuster’s using XHTML, well that would work just fine. In fact, the widget engine itself has a built in XML parser and DOM objects as of not too long ago. Sure enough, Blockbuster’s doctype proudly proclaimed that it was XHTML 1.0 However, upon attempting to parse it, my plans were quickly dampened. At first I was getting errors about a few unsupported entities, like &nsbp; A little massaging of the HTML cleared that right up, and that’s when things got ugly: mismatched end tags all over the place. A quick pass through the validator confirmed it: 305 errors. I guess I should have figured that if they can’t be bothered to provide RSS feeds of your movie queue in the first place that having valid XHTML wouldn’t have been high on their priorities either. (In the interest of full disclosure though, it’s not for me either: 22 errors. The shame of it all.) So now it’s back to the original plan. Anyone know a good HTML parser written in Javascript?
You know – I’ve seen a lot of anti-XHTML hate out there that boils down to a “if you can’t do it right, don’t do it” sentiment. Your problem with Blockbuster’s “XHTML” is a good illustration of the problem. Bad XHTML poisons the waters, so to speak.
By the way, do you have “Mastering Regular Expressions”? Isn’t that a great book? It’s one of those books where you have to pause after every paragraph and think, “this information changes my entire understanding of the universe!”
Poisons the waters and ruins my evening that’s for sure. I mean, how hard is it to close your friggin’ img tags?
I don’t actually have that book, I’ve picked up my limited regex skills from http://www.regular-expressions.info/
I’ve come close to picking up that book a couple times though and if it’ll change my understanding of the universe it sounds like I would be wise to do so.
Would it be wise or would there be drastic consequences for us all.
Ironically, the nbsp got decoded into a real non-breaking space in your blog post.
Testing ” ”
Testing “&160;”
Jolayne and I headed out on another geocaching trip this afternoon, since the weather was nearly perfect. We were initially going to try to find the Airplane Observation Cache up by the airport, but it turned out that the park it was near was overrun by Little League mania (since it contains several baseball fields) so we opted to pass rather than deal with the traffic and crowds. Instead we went with our backup, a cache named Trio of Fore, which was a multi-part cache. This was only our second cache and our first multi-part one so we didn’t know what to expect. The idea of a multi-part cache is that the initial coordinates will lead you to the first part, which will just be a small cache with only the coordinates of the next cache to find, and so on until you reach the final cache which will be a regular cache. As we got started, we ran into another geocacher on his way out who said that he had been able to find the first one but not the second and wished us luck. We found the first one without too much trouble even though it was cleverly disguised (a plastic tube in a fake tree branch) but sure enough the second one ended up being much trickier. It seemed like we were going to have to admit defeat when Jolayne finally uncovered it. The cache was just half a tennis ball with the coordinates of the final cache written on the inside, nestled in some brush at the base of a tree. (The cache was right behind a tennis court so it didn’t look out of place at all) With that step taken care of it was pretty easy to get the last one, since it was just in a regular ammo box cache.
And who found that last cache, Will? I think you left that part out of your story.
But of course, how could I forget: http://www.flickr.com/photos/willgorman/528637190/
Thanks for getting us hooked!
I’d heard of geocaching a while back, but didn’t own a GPS or know much else about it. After mentioning your blog posts to Amanda, she insisted that we get in on the craze. It’s the perfect past time for us — equal parts geekiness and outdoor adventure.
We’ve been caching since Saturday, and have already done 3 of them. Thanks again! I’ll get some details posted at cKure.com here in the next day or so.
Cool, I’m glad you guys like it too. It’s definitely a good way to get out from in front of a monitor while still keeping the geek receptors in the brain happy. What’s your username on geocaching.com? We’re on there as wgorman.