URLWATCH(1)							   User Commands						       URLWATCH(1)

NAME

       urlwatch - Watch web pages and arbitrary URLs for changes

SYNOPSIS

       urlwatch [options]

DESCRIPTION

       urlwatch  watches  a list of URLs for changes and prints out unified diffs of the changes. You can filter always-changing parts of websites
       by providing a "hooks.py" script.

OPTIONS

       --version
	      show program's version number and exit

       -h, --help
	      show the help message and exit

       -v, --verbose
	      Show debug/log output

       --urls=FILE
	      Read URLs from the specified file

       --hooks=FILE
	      Use specified file as hooks.py module

       -e, --display-errors
	      Include HTTP errors (404, etc..) in the output

ADVANCED FEATURES

       urlwatch includes some advanced features that you have to activate by creating a hooks.py file that specifies for which URLs to use a  spe-
       cific feature. You can also use the hooks.py file to filter trivially-varying elements of a web page.

   ICALENDAR FILE PARSING
       This  module allows you to parse .ics files that are in iCalendar format and provide a very simplified text-based format for the diffs. Use
       it like this in your hooks.py file:

	 from urlwatch import ical2txt

	 def filter(url, data):
	     if url.endswith('.ics'):
		 return ical2txt.ical2text(data).encode('utf-8') + data
	     # ...you can add more hooks here...

   HTML TO TEXT CONVERSION
       There are three methods of converting HTML to text in the current version of urlwatch: "lynx" (default), "html2text" and "re".  The  former
       two  use  command-line  utilities of the same name to convert HTML to text, and the last one uses a simple regex-based tag stripping method
       (needs no extra tools).	Here is an example of using it in your hooks.py file:

	 from urlwatch import html2txt

	 def filter(url, data):
	     if url.endswith('.html') or url.endswith('.htm'):
		 return html2txt.html2text(data, method='lynx')
	     # ...you can add more hooks here...

FILES

       ~/.urlwatch/urls.txt
	      A list of HTTP/FTP URLs to watch (one URL per line)

       ~/.urlwatch/lib/hooks.py
	      A Python module that can be used to filter contents

       ~/.urlwatch/cache/
	      The state of web pages is saved in this folder

AUTHOR

       Thomas Perl <thp@thpinfo.com>

WEBSITE

       http://thpinfo.com/2008/urlwatch/

urlwatch 1.11							     July 2010							       URLWATCH(1)