Question

I would like to write an OCaml function which takes a URL and returns a string made up of the contents of the HTML file at that location. Any ideas?

Thanks a lot!

Best,
Surikator.

Answer 1

I’ve done both of those things using ocurl and nethtml

ocurl to read the contents of the URL (tons of properties here; this is the minimum),

let string_of_uri uri = 
    try let connection = Curl.init () and write_buff = Buffer.create 1763 in
        Curl.set_writefunction connection
                (fun x -> Buffer.add_string write_buff x; String.length x);
        Curl.set_url connection uri;
        Curl.perform connection;
        Curl.global_cleanup ();
        Buffer.contents write_buff;
    with _ -> raise (IO_ERROR uri)

and from nethtml; (you might need to set up a DTD for Nethtml.parse)

let parse_html_string uri = 
    let ch = new Netchannels.input_string (string_of_uri uri) in
    let docs = Nethtml.parse ?return_pis:(Some false) ch in
    ch # close_in ();
    docs

Cheers!