Question

This magical Ruby script downloads a couple of XML files from a website, but the files don’t have an extension. I’d like to add the prefix .xml to every file it downloads.

This is where I am right now and it won’t work:

require 'rubygems'
require 'nokogiri'
require 'open-uri'

URL = 'localhost'
extension = '.xml'

Nokogiri::HTML(open(URL)).xpath("//a/@href").each do |src|
  src = File.join(extension).last
  File.open(File.basename(src),'wb') do |f| 
    f.write(open(src).read)
  end
  puts "Done with: #{URL}"
end

Any ideas on how to make this work?

Answer 1

I am assuming that the href attributes in your page’s links contain absolute paths. With that in mind, this should work.

require 'rubygems'
require 'nokogiri'
require 'open-uri'

base_url = 'localhost'
extension = '.xml'

Nokogiri::HTML(open(base_url)).xpath("//a/@href").each do |src|
  File.open(File.basename(src.value, File.extname(src.value)) + extension,'wb'){ |f| 
    f.write(open(src.value).read)
  }
  puts "Done with: #{URL}"
end