Owl Lua API

Owl Lua API

The Owl Lua API is a platform for building parsers in Owl. It consists of instantiable classes and static objects. Each response is processed through HTML Tidy so that all HTML returned is valid XHTML.

regexp Class

The regexp class exposes a POSIX implementation of regular expressions. The class's API is modeled after Qt 4.x's QRegExp implementation.

regexp.new()

Initializes a new instance of the regexp class.

sgml Class

The sgml class parses Html markup and builds an SGML DOM. Note: Parsing of even well formed documents can be slow for very large files.

utils Class

The utils class contains static methods to make common routines in parsers more accessible.

utils.md5()

Returns an ASCII md5 encoding of the given string.

Signature

encodedString utils.md5(rawstring)

Parameters

• rawstring (string) - The string to be encoded.

Return Value

• encodedString (string) - The ASCII'd md5 string

Example <syntaxhighlight lang="lua"> local md5 = utils.md5("password") print (md5); -- output: 5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99 </syntaxhighlight>

webclient Class

The webclient class is used to make HTTP requests. To help reduce load and improve loading time, this class uses an internal cache. Cache requests expire in by default in 30 seconds.

webclient.new()

Initializes a new instance of the webclient class.

webclient.get()

Requests the webpage of the specified webpage using the GET method.

• • Syntax **

html webclient.get(url [, skipCache])

Parameters

• url' (string) - The url of the web page to receive.
• [skipCache] (boolean) - if true the internal cache is bypassed

Return Value

• html (string) - HTML source of the requested page
• status (numeric) - HTTP status code result of the request.
• isError (boolean) - TRUE if there was an error with the request, otherwise FALSE.