FEAR::API Perl Module - Web Scraping Zen

FEAR::API is a tool that helps reduce your time creating site scraping scripts and help you do it in a much more elegant way. FEAR::API combines many strong and powerful features from various CPAN modules, such as LWP::UserAgent, WWW::Mechanize, Template::Extract, Encode, HTML::Parser, etc. and digests them into a deeper Zen. However, this module violates probably every single rule of any Perl coding standards. Please stop here if you don't want to see the yucky code.

This module was originated from a short-term project. I was asked to extract data from several commercial websites. During my development, I found many redundancies of code, and I attempted to reduce the code size and to create something that is specialized to do this job: Site Scraping. (Or Web Scraping, Screen Scraping). Before creating this module, I have surveyed some site scrapers or information extraction tools, and none of them could really satisfy my needs. I meditated on what the my ideal tool should be shaped like, and the ideas gradually got solidified in my mind.

Then I created FEAR::API.

It is a highly specialized module with a domain-specific syntax. Maybe you are used to creating browser emulator using WWW::Mechanize, but you need to write some extra code to parse the content. Sometimes, after you have extracted data from documents, you also need to write some extra code to store them into databases or plain text files. It may be very easy for you, but is not always done quickly. That's why FEAR::API is here. FEAR::API encapsulates necessary components in any site scraping flow, trying to help you speed up the whole process.