Question

Groovy: How do I set/modify the UserAgent?

Asked by: thomers1

i do some screenscraping using groovy.

how can i set or modify the UserAgent that is sent with the HTTP request? i currently see it in my apache access logs as "Java/1.5.0_16" (which is the JDK version i am using).

import org.cyberneko.html.parsers.SAXParser
def url = "http://www.mytesthost.com/"
def html = new XmlSlurper(new SAXParser()).parse(url)

                                  
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Asked On
2009-06-10 at 14:18:58ID24481065
Tags

groovy

,

screen scraping

,

useragent

Topics

Groovy

,

Apache Web Server

Participating Experts
4
Points
500
Comments
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Answers

 

by: objectsPosted on 2009-06-10 at 16:17:42ID: 24597453

you have posted your question in the wrong zone

 

by: TimYatesPosted on 2009-06-11 at 08:21:09ID: 24603417

I don't believe you can.

I know if you can get down to a HttpURLConnection, you can call setRequestHeader to set the User-Agent to whatever you want, but I cannot see a way of getting Xerces to use a custom connection...

I will keep digging, but I don't think it's going to be easy :-(

It's a problem with Java rather than Groovy this...  I don't know how you'd do it in Java either...  Maybe if one of the mods could put it into;

   Java AND Groovy (rather than Apache Web Server)

you'll stand the best chance of getting an answer...  (probably before I can read the xerces source to see where -- if anywhere -- this could be done)

Tim

 

by: warsqlPosted on 2010-04-02 at 19:57:17ID: 29517781

Probably the easiest way would be to use a library like apache httpClient http://hc.apache.org/httpclient-3.x/ to get the html, then use parseText instead of parse

def htmlText = getHttpText(url)
def html = new XmlSlurper(new SAXParser()).parseText(htmlText)


def getHttpText(def url) {
  def client = new HttpClient();
  def method = new GetMethod(url);
  method.setRequestHeader(new Header("UserAgent", "whatever"))
  client.executeMethod(method)
  method. responseBodyAsString
}

 

by: wannabetechiePosted on 2011-05-03 at 05:27:58ID: 35512345

You can try using HTTPBuilder(http://groovy.codehaus.org/modules/http-builder/home.html) which is a groovy wrapper around apache http-client

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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