Woofy

Hello. I have been trying to add custom definitions to Woofy, but not only does the one I tried to make not work, neither of the ones I've tried from the officially listed definitions (8 Bit Theater and Spinnerette) work either. I have been saving the text as .XML files to C:\Users\(me)\AppData\Roaming\Woofy\bin\definitions. Any help would be appreciated.

Edit: I have discovered that you're supposed to save them as .def, not as .xml, and they are at least being recognized now. However, the currently used format is completely different from the format in the tutorial on the site, so the definition I tried to write doesn't work. Is there a tutorial or walkthrough for this new format?

There's no tutorial/walkthrough yet - it's on my todo list, but I haven't had a lot of time to work on Woofy lately (and when I do, I prefer to fix bugs/implement features :) ).

Anyways, you can get an idea of how the new definition format works from the following threads: http://woofy.vladiliescu.ro/forum/t-287418/woofy-1-0-alpha#post-949221 and http://woofy.vladiliescu.ro/forum/t-349352/what-is-the-syntax-for-1-1-and-what-is-wrong-with-with-my-re . If you need any more info, ask away and I'll try to help you.

Thank you for the links! I've gotten my definition to at least download the first strip from 70 Seas. However, when it tries to move on to the next one, it crashes. Could this be because it's a text link instead of an image one? I got help with making the regex for the link, and I got:

comic "70 Seas"
start_at "http://70-seas.com/?p=1248"

for page in visit ("""<a\shref=\"http://70-seas.com/\?p=[0-9]{4}\"\stitle=\"[^"]+\"\sclass=\"next-comic-link\"><span>Next\s&rsaquo;</span></a>"""):
    download("""/comics/proper/Chapter-[^.]*-[0-9]{2}.jpg|/comics/proper/Chapter-[^.]*-Cover.jpg""")

This worked in Expresso, but it looks pretty messy. Also, the last log entry was:

[11/14/2013 8:39:07 PM][sevseas_old_thre visit] http://70-seas.com/<a href="http://70-seas.com/?p=1253" title="Prologue 01" class="next-comic-link"><span>Next ›</span></a>

and while I'm not quite a tech wizard, I at least know that that's not a proper URL at all. Could I get some help with this? If it helps, a typical link to the next strip looks like:

<a href="http://70-seas.com/?p=(Four digits)" title="(One or two words and then a number here)" class="next-comic-link"><span>Next &rsaquo;</span></a>

with the parts that change put in parentheses. Any further assistance would be greatly appreciated!

If you only need Woofy to use a part of the string captured by the regular expression, then you should use a named capture group called "content". I've updated your definition to use it - let me know if it works for you. For more examples of how it can be used check the current definitions.

comic "70 Seas"
start_at "http://70-seas.com/?p=1248"
 
for page in visit ("""<a\shref=\"(?<content>http://70-seas.com/\?p=[0-9]{4})\"\stitle=\"[^"]+\"\sclass=\"next-comic-link\"><span>Next\s&rsaquo;</span></a>"""):
    download("""/comics/proper/Chapter-[^.]*-[0-9]{2}.jpg|/comics/proper/Chapter-[^.]*-Cover.jpg""")

Thank you so much! It's not crashing now, at least. :) However, the filename deviates for some early strips- specifically, instead of Chapter-romannumeral-number, they are simply named romannumeral-number. I am unsure how to make the "Chapter" part optional (I know it involves the ? operator somehow, but I'm still working that out). Any further tips? I'll edit this if I figure out the answer in my own.

Edit: I've done it! For lack of a more elegant solution, I managed to set each character to optional.

download("""/comics/proper/C?h?a?p?t?e?r?-?[^.]*-[0-9]{2}.jpg|/comics/proper/Chapter-[^.]*-Cover.jpg""")

It could look better, but oh well. Thank you so much for your help! 70 Seas is probably my favorite webcomic right now, and I'm glad to finally be able to download it.

Glad you got it working!

Also, instead of marking each character as optional you could group the characters and mark the group as optional, like this:

download("""/comics/proper/(Chapter-)?[^.]*-[0-9]{2}.jpg|/comics/proper/Chapter-[^.]*-Cover.jpg""")

Ah, it was parentheses that group characters? My bad, I must've skipped through that part of the regex tutorial. Oh well, I guess. Thanks for the tip; I'll keep it in mind next time I feel like writing a definition for Woofy.