WebFetch is a set of

Perl 5 Perl is a family of two High-level programming language, high-level, General-purpose programming language, general-purpose, Interpreter (computing), interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it ...

modules written by Ian Kluft from 1998 through 2009 that provides a framework for retrieving information feeds from the Web, or posting a feed on a web site. It is intended to be run on a

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

server automatically, such as from

cron The cron command-line utility is a job scheduler on Unix-like operating systems. Users who set up and maintain software environments use cron to schedule jobs (commands or shell scripts), also known as cron jobs, to run periodically at fixed ti ...

. The current version 0.13 was released September 20, 2009. It is

Open Source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open ...

, licensed under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the Four Freedoms (Free software), four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was th ...

. WebFetch can collect various types of inputs via plugin modules and send or store them to various outputs also via plugin modules. Inputs include

RSS RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many di ...

Atom Every atom is composed of a nucleus and one or more electrons bound to the nucleus. The nucleus is made of one or more protons and a number of neutrons. Only the most common variety of hydrogen has no neutrons. Every solid, liquid, gas, and ...

, local news feed files, and perl data structures. Outputs include perl data structures, the

Template Toolkit The Template Toolkit (TT) is a template engine used primarily for building web sites, but is also suitable for creating any type of digital document, such as a PDF or LaTeX file. Template Toolkit is based on a mini-language and does not allow di ...

and pages in

TWiki TWiki is a Perl-based structured wiki application, typically used to run a collaboration platform, knowledge or document management system, a knowledge base, or team portal. Users can create wiki pages using the TWiki Markup Language, and develo ...

systems.

History

Before there were RSS and Atom aggregation, WebFetch started with modules to retrieve news in ad hoc feed formats of various web sites, including

Slashdot ''Slashdot'' (sometimes abbreviated as ''/.'') is a social news website that originally advertised itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It features news stories concerning science, technology, and politics that are submitted and evalu ...

. WebFetch is available from the

Comprehensive Perl Archive Network The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) is a repository of over 250,000 software modules and accompanying documentation for 39,000 distributions, written in the Perl programming language by over 12,000 contributors. ''CPAN'' can denote eit ...

. The following Perl modules are included with it. * WebFetch::Input::Atom - Atom feed reader * WebFetch::Input::PerlStruct - Perl structure input * WebFetch::Input::RSS - RSS feed reader * WebFetch::Input::SiteNews - local "site news" file reader * WebFetch::Output::Dump - perl structure dump output * WebFetch::Output::TT - Template Toolkit output * WebFetch::Output::TWiki - TWiki page output The following Perl modules were based on ad hoc news formats from before RSS, and in some cases

web scraping Web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction is data scraping used for extracting data from websites. Web scraping software may directly access the World Wide Web using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol or a web browser. While web scraping ...

. They used to be provided with WebFetch in the past, but were deprecated and removed. * WebFetch::CNETnews * WebFetch::CNNsearch * WebFetch::COLA * WebFetch::DebianNews * WebFetch::Freshmeat * WebFetch::LinuxDevNet * WebFetch::LinuxTelephony * WebFetch::LinuxToday * WebFetch::ListSubs * WebFetch::Slashdot * WebFetch::32BitsOnline * WebFetch::YahooBiz

References

External links

*
WebFetch Add-On
for

{{DEFAULTSORT:Webfetch Perl modules Web software News aggregators Atom (Web standard) Unix Internet software