Question

Im new to the Ruby world and am trying to write a program that wil read a list of urls (stored in urls.txt) and then try to get a response from that url and output the status of that request (either true or false) to another file.

How would I go about this? Are there any libaries like mechanize (http://mechanize.rubyforge.org/) that can help me?

Answer 1

Assuming by status you mean HTTP Status Codes.
This will give you false for any fail codes, and true on any success based codes. I’m not sure if that’s what you want though.

require 'open-uri'  #=> part of the standard library

#first open the file and read it line by line

File.open("./urls.txt", "r").each_line do |url|

 #then for each url set a flag to true or false

    flag = false
    begin
      open url
      flag = true  #if we're able to read the url flag is set to true
    rescue
      flag = false #otherwise false
    end
    puts flag

end