WWW::Baidu - Perl interface for the www.baidu.com search engine

This document describes version 0.06 of WWW::Baidu, released Jan 21, 2007.

    use WWW::Baidu;
    my $baidu = WWW::Baidu->new;
    # ensure the keys are in the GBK/GB2312 encoding if they're Chinese
    my $count = $baidu->search('Perl "Larry Wall"', 'Audrey');
    $baidu->limit(200);
    while (my $record = $baidu->next) {
        # the results are in GBK/GB2312 encoding
        print $record->title, "\n",
              $record->url, "\n",
              $record->summary, "\n",
              $record->date, "\n",
              $record->size, "\n",
              $record->cached_url, "\n\n\n";
    }

Baidu.com is a very popular Chinese search engine which does similar things as Google. This module provides you with a Perl interface to that site.

$obj = WWW::Baidu->new()

$obj = WWW::Baidu->new( cache => $cache )

This is the constructor for WWW::Baidu. It accepts an optional argument which will must be a Cache::Cache-compatible object. WWW::Baidu will use this cache instead of a default Cache::FileCache instance.

$count = $obj->search($key1, $key2, ...)

Searches Baidu by the given keys and returns the total records reported by Baidu. Note that the return value $count is only an estimation by Baidu. Usually it's not equal to the total number of records that you can fetch by the next method.

It's highly recommended to pass only string keys in the GBK or GB2312 encoding.

A call of this method will clear the internal search results' buffer and the iterator counter, but the limit setting is left intact.

$obj->limit($count)

Limits the total number of records WWW::Baidu will try to offer. This method will affect the next() method. And the internal counter will also get cleared if the search method is called again.

$record = $obj->next()

Returns the next search result which is a WWW::Baidu::Record object. WWW::Baidu accesses the baidu.com site rather lazily. That is, it only "clicks" the "Next page" link in case that the user has fetched all the records in the internal buffer.

When there's no more records (due to the capability of Baidu itself or the upper-limit set via the limit method), this method will return undef.

WWW::Baidu uses WWW::Mechanize::Cached internally so that your program will run much faster during debugging and will also behave more politely to the Baidu.com site.

• The values returned by the WWW::Baidu::Record objects' properties are always in the GBK (or GB2312) encoding. If you want unicode semantics, please decode the results using the Encode module yourself. :)
  
  It's not a bug in WWW::Baidu.
• Althogh WWW::Baidu has tried very hard to behave politely to Baidu.com via both caching, limiting, and lazy iteration, it's still important for the user not to abuse it.
  
  During debugging, it's highly recommended to fix your search keys fed into the search method, so that WWW::Baidu can take advantage of the caching facility and your scripts will also run swiftly without the pain of accessing the web.
  
  Please don't punish others' sites for your own programming mistakes. :)

I use Devel::Cover to test the code coverage of my tests, below is the Devel::Cover report on this module test suite.

    ---------------------------- ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------
    File                           stmt   bran   cond    sub    pod   time  total
    ---------------------------- ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------
    blib/lib/WWW/Baidu.pm          98.1   84.6   66.7  100.0  100.0  100.0   93.9
    blib/lib/WWW/Baidu/Record.pm  100.0    n/a    n/a  100.0    n/a    0.0  100.0
    Total                          98.2   84.6   66.7  100.0  100.0  100.0   94.3
    ---------------------------- ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------

You can always get the latest source code from the following Subversion repos:

https://svn.openfoundry.org/wwwbaidu

It has anonymous access to all.

If you like to get a commit bit, please let me know. I've been trying to follow Audrey's best practices. ;)

Agent Zhang <agentzh@gmail.com>

Copyright (c) 2007 by Agent Zhang. All rights reserved.

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

WWW::Baidu::Record, http://www.baidu.com, WWW::Mechanize::Cached.