urlwatch (1)

urlwatch [options]

urlwatch watches a list of URLs for changes and prints out unified diffs of the changes. You can filter always-changing parts of websites by providing a "hooks.py" script.

--version

show program's version number and exit

-h, --help

show the help message and exit

-v, --verbose

Show debug/log output

--urls=FILE

Read URLs from the specified file

--hooks=FILE

Use specified file as hooks.py module

-e, --display-errors

Include HTTP errors (404, etc..) in the output

urlwatch includes some advanced features that you have to activate by creating a hooks.py file that specifies for which URLs to use a specific feature. You can also use the hooks.py file to filter trivially-varying elements of a web page.

ICALENDAR FILE PARSING

This module allows you to parse .ics files that are in iCalendar format and provide a very simplified text-based format for the diffs. Use it like this in your hooks.py file:

  from urlwatch import ical2txt

  def filter(url, data):
      if url.endswith('.ics'):
          return ical2txt.ical2text(data).encode('utf-8') + data
      # ...you can add more hooks here...
      return data

HTML TO TEXT CONVERSION

There are three methods of converting HTML to text in the current version of urlwatch: "lynx" (default), "html2text" and "re". The former two use command-line utilities of the same name to convert HTML to text, and the last one uses a simple regex-based tag stripping method (needs no extra tools). Here is an example of using it in your hooks.py file:

  from urlwatch import html2txt

  def filter(url, data):
      if url.endswith('.html') or url.endswith('.htm'):
          return html2txt.html2text(data, method='lynx')
      # ...you can add more hooks here...
      return data

~/.urlwatch/urls.txt

A list of HTTP/FTP URLs to watch (one URL per line)

~/.urlwatch/lib/hooks.py

A Python module that can be used to filter contents

~/.urlwatch/cache/

The state of web pages is saved in this folder

Thomas Perl <thp.io/about>

http://thp.io/2008/urlwatch/