Question

I am building a crawler, I know how to use ruby mechanize to read a page from the net using this code:

require 'mechanize'
agent = Mechanize.new
agent.get "http://google.com"

But can I use Mechanize to read an HTML file from the file system? How?

Answer 1

IMHO it doesn’t make sense trying to use mechanize for such a situation. Maybe you would like to parse HTML. Then try nokogiri (mechanize uses it for parsing too)

e.g. use

Nokogiri::HTML(open('index.html'))

instead of

session.get('http://www.google.com')