yahoo-group-data gem

Yahoo doesn't provide an API to it's publicly available group info, so this gem covers that gap. Use it to find information about a Yahoo group such as name, description and relevant email addresses.

require 'yahoo-group-data'

g = YahooGroupData.new("http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/OneStopCOBOL/")

name = g.name
description = g.description
num_members = g.num_members

p = g.post_email
s = g.subscribe_email
u = g.unsubscribe_email
o = g.unsubscribe_email

json = g.to_json

These should be relatively self-explanatory. Where the data is unnavailable (for instance the group name if no group was found) the return value will be nil

• not_found?
• private?
• age_restricted?
• no_data? (true if any of the above are true, othersise false. Here for convenience)

• name
• description
• post_email
• subscribe_email
• owner_email
• unsubscribe_email
• language
• category
• to_json

• num_members (Integer)
• founded (Date)

It's tested with Ruby 1.9.3, it probably works with older versions.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'yahoo-group-data'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install yahoo-group-data

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Added some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request

pull requests with tests are more likely to be accepted

Rather than distribute a load of Yahoo's HTML pages with the gem there's a rake task to get the ones that are needed. Run:

$ rake fetch_yahoo_pages

after that:

$ rake test

Because of the dynamic nature of Yahoo groups it's quite possible that the number of members a group has in groups.yml will have diverged with the number of members in reality when you pull down the pages using "rake fetch_yahoo_pages". If you see any of these divergences just update groups.yml appropriately.

Tell me about it, or (in preference) update the gem (Hint: start by adding an entry to the groups.yml file), see contributing instructions above.

• Will Jessop (will@willj.net)