Lua

Getting Started Spidering a Site

See more Spider Examples

This is a very simple "getting started" example for spidering a web site. As you'll see in future examples, the Chilkat Spider library can be used to crawl the Web. For now, we'll concentrate on spidering a single site. Lua

local chilkat = require("chilkat")

local success = false

local spider = chilkat.Spider.new()

-- The spider object crawls a single web site at a time.  As you'll see
-- in later examples, you can collect outbound links and use them to
-- crawl the web.  For now, we'll simply spider 10 pages of chilkatsoft.com
spider:initialize("www.chilkatsoft.com")

-- Add the 1st URL:
spider:add_unspidered("http://www.chilkatsoft.com/")

-- Begin crawling the site by calling CrawlNext repeatedly.
for i = 0, 9 do
    success = spider:crawl_next()
    if success then
        -- Show the URL of the page just spidered.
        print(spider.last_url)
        -- The HTML is available in the LastHtml property
    else
        -- Did we get an error or are there no more URLs to crawl?
        if spider.num_unspidered == 0 then
            print("No more URLs to spider")
        else
            print(spider.last_error_text)
        end
    end

    -- Sleep 1 second before spidering the next URL.
    spider:sleep_ms(1000)
end