Status
automated voice on the Utility Service phone is creepily alive
Location
1055 N Nelson St, Arlington, VA
Subscribe to GeoRSS Subscribe to KML

06 Sep 2006

Converting table-based Calendars to hCalendar

Published in FOSS4G, Programming, Ruby  |  5 Comments

FOSS4G Calendar in iCalI am looking over the FOSS4G Schedule of sessions. It’s all table based, and it’s somewhat difficult to find specific tracks, rooms, etc. So I took what was the table-based, non-semantic, calendar and converted it into a much more useful hCalendar output, which can be easily translated to iCal for your subscription fun using Brian Suda’s X2V.

You can get the hCalendar here and the iCal link here.

The Problem

Here is the current HTML of the schedule. As you can see, this is an absolute mess of DOM. This table is in fact already the 4th embedded table (tables-within-tables-within-tables oh my!)








In the middle there was some actual interesting bits, such as presentation title, author, times, etc. So what we need to do is walk through all this and build up a conference.
The Solution
Employing some slick Ruby scripting - and using the very useful  scrAPI from Assaf we can define scrapers to walk over the multiple days, and then within those days grab each of the sessions. These are then output into proper hCalendar format like: 
<span class="vevent">
 <a class="url" href="http://www.foss4g2006.org/contributionDisplay.py?contribId=189&amp;sessionId=46&amp;confId=1">
  <span class="summary">Enabling Users to Produce personalized Geodata</span>
  <span class="details"><span class="vcard"><span class="fn">Mr. Andrew TURNER</span><span class="org">HighEarthOrbit</span></span></span>
  <abbr class="dtstart" title="2006-09-15T10:30:00Z">Friday,  15 September 2006 from 10:30</abbr>-
  <abbr class="dtend" title="2006-09-15T11:00:00Z">11:00</abbr>,
 at the <span class="location">Amphimax MAX 350</span>
 </a>
</span>

The code below makes parsing the nightmare above fairly simple, but due to the lack of any proper classes or id’s (each presentation is id="entry" - eep!), we have to find the bits we want by their current markup attributes. Not suggested, but at least this is nicer than trying to figure out the 10-levels of DOM starting at the root.
You can see the parser here.
Responses

		Feed
		Trackback Address	
    

	
		
  1. 
			Erniepower says:
						
    

			
    September 27th, 2007 at 10:38 pm (#) 
    

			
    Did just find this site http://www.ebay-makemoney.com/ quite nice if your using ebay really. 
    

    Ebay Make Money
    

		
    2. 

	
	
		
  2. 
			selsnviu says:
						
    

			
    September 29th, 2007 at 8:52 pm (#) 
    

			
    Thanks for the post.
    
Great info.
    

		
    3. 

	
	
		
  3. 
			JackJackson says:
						
    

			
    October 4th, 2007 at 6:48 am (#) 
    

			
    Hi all! 
    

    I know that you are busy, but you should know it 
    

    foam rubber pillow 
    

    G’night
    

		
    4. 

	
	
		
  4. 
			HHDarnell says:
						
    

			
    October 4th, 2007 at 5:23 pm (#) 
    

			
    Hi all!
    
Óíèêàëüíàÿ VIP ñèñòåìà ðàñ÷åòà ñïîðòèâíûõ ñòàâîê !
    
äîãîâîðíÿêè, ñòàâêè íà ñïîðò, ôóòáîë, åñòü âñå!
    
90% ðàñ÷åòíûõ ñòàâîê âûèãðûøíûå ñ êô 1.7
    
Ïîäðîáíîñòè òóò http://marafona.net 
    

    G’night
    

		
    5. 

	
	
		
  5. 
			naisioxerloro says:
						
    

			
    November 28th, 2007 at 10:37 am (#) 
    

			
    Hi.
    
Good design, who make it?
    

		
    6. 

	
	
	
Leave a Response












Tuesday, 12 September 2006
















07:00

    Registration(Amphipôle (niv. 3): 07:00 - 09:00)
  


























08:00


























09:00






   [20] Getting Started with MapServer
   by Mr. Jeff MCKENNA (DM Solutions Group)
 

 paper paper