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rjbs (4671)

rjbs
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http://rjbs.manxome.org/
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I'm a Perl coder living in Bethlehem, PA and working Philadelphia. I'm a philosopher and theologan by training, but I was shocked to learn upon my graduation that these skills don't have many associated careers. Now I write code.

Journal of rjbs (4671)

Thursday September 15, 2005
11:21 PM

vim, my new netflix client

[ #26740 ]

Tonight, I was struck by an urge to JFDI. For a long time, I've wanted a better way to organize my Netflix queue. There used to be Netflix Freak, which was decent, but cost money, and I think it went away. I think it had other problems, I just can't remember anymore.

Anyway, what I really wanted was a way to save my queue to a text file, edit the file, and then upload it again. It should have been simple, but the form used on Netflix is pretty ugly, and I was having a hell of a time figuring out how to deal with it using TokeParser, which is built in to Mech. I knew it wasn't the right sort of parser, but I didn't know what was better. Finally, I asked #perl where I could get something to say "for each div of class foo, do X." DrForr pointed me toward HTML::Tree, which made this task incredibly simple.

Now I can save my queue, rearrange the file, and update my queue. No more trying to remember what number I put in front of what, no more trying to keep lots of changes in my head at once. I put the lines in the order I want and hit "go!" It doesn't delete or add movies yet, but I may (or may not) add that. Tomorrow I'll probably collect these two little hacks into one program with some command line switches.

In the meantime, I would like everyone to know that Sean Burke and Andy Lester deserve candy and hugs for giving away such great toolkits.


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  • My hammer of choice is forcing the input to XHTML using HTMLTidy, then attacking it with XPath. XPath rocks extremely hard. HTML::Tidy (there’s Andy Lester again) and XML::LibXML are excellent tools for this approach.

    • Do you really need to tidy first? I just make sure recover mode is turned on and use LibXML's parse_html method - works for me. Maybe you have to deal with uglier HTML than I do.

      • I didn’t think of that because I actually use XSLT most of the time (nowadays a Perl wrapper script around XML::LibXSLT and the aforementioned modules), and there’s something really strange going on with namespaces in a DOM built using libxml’s HTML parser, which causes strange misbehaviour in XSL transforms that I never figured out (just had hours of debugging fun with). When I started out, I didn’t even have the option because I was in fact using libxslt’s xsltproc utility, a

  • Of course, now what you need to do is make one script that, on startup, downloads your queue to a tmp file, spawn the editor, checks for changes on exit, and if changed uploads it back to netflix, all in one step.
    • Actually, what I did was create :getQueue and :pushQueue. I think that I'm more comfortable being explicit: I don't want to hit the wrong few keys and accidentally delete all the movies from my queue!
      --
      rjbs
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