Simple web scraping with Bash
Ski Report
© Photo by Nicolai Berntsen on Unsplash
With one line of Bash code, Pete scrapes the web and builds a desktop notification app to get the daily snow report.
While recently doing a small project, I was amazed by how much web scraping I could do with just one line of Bash. I used the text-based Lynx browser [1] and then piped the output to a grep search. Figure 1 shows the one-line Bash example that scrapes the current snow depth from the Sunshine Village Snow Forecast web page.
Figure 1: One line of Bash code finds the web text for the current snow depth.
In this article, I will introduce some techniques to easily scrape web pages, and then I will create a desktop notification script that provides the daily snow forecast.
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