spatula v0.1.0

#Spatula

Because it's way easier than copy/pasting all the pages.

##Usage:

var S = require('spatula');

var menu = new S.Menu('http://example.com','nav > ul > li','ul > li');

var template = {
  'title': 'h1#title',
  'images': ['ul#slider > li img'],
  'content': 'div#content'
};

var save = function (collection) {
  //save to database
}

S.scrape(save,menu,template);

##API:

###Spatula.Menu(url,paths...)

Constructor, returns Spatula.Menu object.

url is a URL. Each path argument is used as a cheerio selector, and Spatula automatically extracts the href attribute of the first child anchor element. (Spatula also recreates absolute URLs from relative URL paths.) If only one argument is given, the menu will only be one level deep. If multiple arguments are given, the menu will use the arguments as relative DOM paths at their corresponding level indices. If multiple arguments are given, the last argument will be used recursively for a maximum of ten menu levels.

###Spatula.scrape(callback, menu, template, parser)

• callback is... well, you figure it out.
• menu is either a menu object (the result of calling Spatula.menu()) or a menu array of the form:

[
  "<url>",
  "<url>",
  {
    "<url>": [
      "<url>",
      .
      .
      .
      {
        "<url>": [
          .
          .
          .
          "<url>"
        ]
      }
    ]
  },
  .
  .
  .
  .
  "<url>"
]

• template is a nestable dictionary object of the form:

{
  "<key>": "<cheerio path>", //string value only return first match
  "<key>": ["<cheerio path"], //single-value array returns all matches
  "<key>": function($){ //function accepts cheerio and returns template content
    return $(".menu").split('|');
  },
  .
  .
  .
  "<key>": {
    "<key>": "<cheerio path>",
    .
    .
    .
  }
}

It is important to note that all of the cheerio paths in template are relative to the document, not to each other (unlike the path arguments to Spatula.Menu)

• parser is a function receiving HTML snippets for the template, and returning a parsed version of them. This is Spatula.markdown by default. Explicitly setting parser to false will populate the template with unparsed HTML.

###Spatula.markdown(html)

Used internally to convert HTML content to markup.