
Introducing SelectorGadget: point and click minimal CSS selectors - tectonic
http://www.selectorgadget.com
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tectonic
Please tell me when you find sites that it doesn't work on, there are so many
edge cases.

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chrisconley
This is awesome. It would've have been super useful building our mobile
interface to Philadelphia's regional rail schedules where we scraped SEPTA's
site for data. <http://www.septa.org/service/sched/r2s_wk.html> is an example
of the markup we had to deal with.

I think I'll have to go back and crosscheck your selectors with what I came up
with to see if we can't improve anything. Thanks!

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thaumaturgy
Oh sweet merciful Bob that has got to be some of the nastiest markup I've ever
seen.

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dominik
Excellent work; I also liked your screencast, you did a good job in quickly
showing what SelectorGadget did!

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bprater
Agreed -- and then gave suggestions below. Perfect! I immediately started
coming up with ways I could use it on a couple projects I'm working on.

I hope all purveyors of webapps will use this as a shining example of a demo
well done.

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mattjaynes
Wow, this made my day. I've been using FireQuark (a custom firebug that
provides CSS selectors - [http://www.quarkruby.com/2007/9/5/firequark-quick-
html-scree...](http://www.quarkruby.com/2007/9/5/firequark-quick-html-screen-
scraping)) and while it was very helpful, SelectorGadget will remove sooo much
more of the pain of scraping. Major kudos.

As an aside, I'll mention the nokogiri gem (almost identical to hpricot, but
under much more active development), that's what I've been using and it's
excellent. <http://github.com/tenderlove/nokogiri/tree/master>

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tectonic
Just so you know, there was, and may still be, an off-by-one error in
Hpricot's implementation of nth-child that may confuse you when using the
selectors generated by SelectorGadget.

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fizx
It's a one char fix:

[http://github.com/fizx/hpricot/commit/1208019ade1af02816de62...](http://github.com/fizx/hpricot/commit/1208019ade1af02816de6217d3c34bd82054b9b7)

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andreyf
This is the kind of stuff that blows my mind. Between all of the people who
will ever use it, you've probably saved a lifetime's worth of fiddling with
CSS selectors. Kudos to you, sir!

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sam_in_nyc
Very nice tool. Reminds me of the Dapper interface. I could see this being
used to build some sort of notifier service. For example, "notify me when any
of these change."

Great work

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quilby
You are probably talking about - <http://www.dapper.net/dapp-factory.jsp> ,
which is basically a much more powerful 'selectorgadget'.

Edit: After using selectorgadget for a couple of minutes I found a case where
selectorgadget works much better than dapper.net. selectorgadget is great!

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cpher
Very clever. It's like a souped-up version of the Outline Current Element tool
in Firefox's Web Developer Toolbar. Nice work!

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CalmQuiet
Impressive flexibility. I haven't encountered any problems yet on FF or
Safari.

Another use I see for it is in teaching JS / jQuery / etc.

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akikuchi
Amazing timing on this release- I just learned the basics of CSS the other
day, and this is going to be a really helpful tool to keep the learning
process going. Well done and thanks!

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jrockway
OK, I know this is off topic, but... I read this article an hour or so ago,
and I have had the Inspector Gadget theme song stuck in my head since then.

Someone make it stop :)

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misterbwong
Extremely useful. I love it. I've been using the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar
to guess at my selectors, but this is infinitely faster.

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rjblackman
awesome. seems to work in chrome just fine. I can't see how this is useful for
scraping though, is there scraping software that can take css selectors as
criteria?

I've previously just used mechanize/hpricot and copied the xpath from firebug
to get the areas i want to scrape.

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tectonic
Hpricot can take CSS selectors.

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jonny_noog
Very cool. Thank you.

Thanks also for exposing me to screentoaster.com, I've been hoping for a
service like this.

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tectonic
I just pushed out XPath generation support to the dev version.

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PStamatiou
Andrew, this is badass! Great work.

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sarp
Brilliant!

