Woofy

Hi there,

I've finally released an alpha of v1.0. It's not entirely ready for prime-time - hence the alpha status - but it does its job most of the time. I'm particularly proud of the new definition format, it should make adding new features a lot easier in the long run.

Features:

• A completely rewritten download engine.
• An improved user interface, with more information about the download process.
• Downloads comics from start to finish, and not backwards.
• After each download Woofy pauses for 2 seconds, in order to minimize server hammering.
• The settings files are stored under each user's profile - should fix some issues with Windows 7/Vista.
• Removed the proxy settings, Woofy will use whatever proxy has been set for Internet Explorer.
• Added one (that's right, ONE) new comic - Snowflakes.

Download here

P.S. I haven't had time to update the tutorial for the new format, I'll probably get to it after 1.0 final is released. If you have any questions, post them on the forum, and I'll try to answer them to the best of my knowledge.

P.P.S. Due to the way the new engine has been implemented, people can do some crazy stuff inside a definition. Like for example delete the Program Files folder. This will be addressed in v1.0 final, but until then only use definitions from reliable sources.

@mololabo:

I haven't had the time to write a guide for the new format yet - it will have to wait until after 1.0 final is released (which shouldn't take much longer).

I can explain it to you briefly though. The definition is actually written in a programming language - Boo (well, technically it's a domain-specific language written using Boo :) ).

The first two keywords (comic and start_at) tell Woofy the comic's name, and the starting page. Notice that the download starts at the comic's first page and goes on from there, as opposed to the way Woofy 0.6 works (starts at the latest page and goes backwards until it finds a strip it has already downloaded) - I believe this should alleviate your problems with 2kinds, since you will no longer have to deal with the archive AND the frontpage.

The next two lines instruct Woofy to visit each page with a url matching the visit regex and download the matching images in each visited page. If you'd like to download images matching multiple regular expressions, simply call download multiple times, one for each expression, as seen below:

...
 
for page in visit("""next page url"""):
    download("""first image regex""")
    download("""second image regex""")

You could also call download without being contained in a for loop (e.g. for downloading Picasa galleries), and it will work.

Let me know if it helps.

Do the old definitions still work or will they have to be rewritten? Aside from that looks good :).

Nope, they will have to be rewritten using the new syntax. You can keep the same regular expressions, but remember that this version downloads comics from beginning to end, as opposed to the old way of downloading the most recent strips first - so you'll have to capture the next page link, instead of the previous page.

Ok then Guess ill start working on remaking the definitions I have with me :).

Let me know how it goes - I tried to make the new definition format easier to read/write, but I didn't have any feedback except my own :)

Just thought I would say that I wont be able try and recode the definitions until probably next weekend due to last week and this week being busy due to exams. But fret not I will help explain the difficulties of the new system soon enough :).

Any sign of the documentation for Boo defs? I'm holding off re-writing mine for now as would like to be able to re-create the renaming.

Sorry, but it's gonna take a while. Anyways, the new version doesn't yet support comic renaming, it can only prepend each strip's index - so if it's critical for you to be able to rename strips, then you're better off using v0.6. However, if what you actually want is to be able to include metadata about each strip (e.g. title, description), then Woofy 1.0 will offer a fancier way to do this, using the XMP standard. I can't give you a release date though.

First things first I'm posting this at 3:30 in the morning after doing a whole bunch of homework so may just be me being brain dead. But so far its looking not to bad for porting the scripts. The first one im working on im having a bit of difficulty but it could just be something I missed. But the real reason why I'm posting is to ask if you could readd the debug tool. Currently my script just causes the program to crash :(. Any ways i'll continue to try this when i'm less tired and more rational :).

TLDR: Can we get the debug tool back so I dont have to keep crashing Woofy to try my script.

Ps: Also thought I should include what I have so far.

comic "Sequential art"
start_at "http://www.collectedcurios.com/sequentialart.php?s=1"

for page in visit("""[<a\shref="(?<content>/[^.]{13}\.[^.]{3}\?[^.]=[0-9]\w{1,})"><img\ssrc="Nav_ForwardOne\.gif"\stitle="Foreward\sone"\s/><a/>]]"""):
download("""[[^.]{2}_[0-9]{4}_[^.]*\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png)]""")

Ok I figured out what was wrong with it. It was the Square brackets I had left in that was causing the crashing now I just need to figure out the link definition thin :).