SYNOPSIS
urlwatch [options]DESCRIPTION
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.OPTIONS
- --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
ADVANCED FEATURES
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
FILES
- ~/.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