Woofy

I found instructions on creating definitions files here:http://woofy.sourceforge.net/tutorial.html
and here: https://code.google.com/p/woofy/wiki/BuildingAComicDefinition

I suspect that those instructions are out-of-date, as they talk about Woofy working backwards from the current strip to the last, and it seems to work the other way around when I try.

I tried writing a definitions file myself (for Sinfest), based on some of the more recently updated definitions (specifically grrlpower and evilinc), but I couldn't get it to work. Here's what I got:

comic "Sinfest"
start_at "http://www.sinfest.net/view.php?date=2000-01-17"

for page in visit("""<a href="(?<content>[^"]*?)"><img src="../images/next.gif">"""):
    download("""<img src="(?<content>[^"]*?)" alt="[^"]*?">""")

Any advice in getting this to work is appreciated, and if anyone has some advice about getting a bit more to grips with the regex stuff, that would be good too.

Thanks.

You also need to mention that there's space between the a and img elements - see the "\s*" bit below. Other than that, good job :)

comic "Sinfest"
start_at "http://www.sinfest.net/view.php?date=2000-01-17"
 
for page in visit("""<a href="(?<content>[^"]*?)">\s*<img src="../images/next.gif">"""):
    download("""<img src="(?<content>[^"]*?)" alt="[^"]*?">""")

In any case, this won't work further than the second page because the web server will reject the second request - I'm assuming they're checking for bots or something along those lines. A pity really - I used to read a lot of Sinfest some years ago.

One more thing - you can use Roy Osherove's Regulator for quickly testing regular expressions - http://osherove.com/tools . Just remember to set the Ignore case and Multiline options to ON. And the Ignore whitespace to OFF.

Thanks - very useful advice even if it won't work for this particular webcomic.