Yahoo! Hacks

Program Yahoo! with Perl

Grabbing data from Yahoo! Search Web Services can be quite easy with just a little bit of Perl.

Perl is great for getting things done quickly, and fetching search results from Yahoo! is no exception. This hack shows a simple way to access Yahoo! with Perl, using minimal code. Think of it as a doorway to Yahoo! that you can drop into your own Perl scripts, or that you can use as a starting point for more complex applications. This script will accept a keyword or phrase, contact Yahoo! Search, and print out the first 10 results.

What You Need

In the spirit of keeping things easy, this hack uses two simple modules that may already be installed on your system: LWP::Simple (http://search.cpan.org/~gaas/libwww-perl-5.803/lib/LWP/Simple.pm) makes the HTTP request; XML::Simple (http://search.cpan.org/~grantm/XML-Simple-2.14/lib/XML/Simple.pm) parses the XML response. If you need to install these modules, you can use CPAN for each module:

	                 perl –MCPAN –e shell
	cpan> install XML::Simple

On a Windows system with ActivePerl, you can install these modules from the command line with the Perl package manager, like this:

	                 ppm install LWP-Simple

The only other piece you’ll need is a unique application ID from Yahoo!, which you can pick up at http://api.search.yahoo.com/webservices/register_application.

The Code

This code builds a Yahoo! Search Web Services request URL using the keyword passed to it when the script is run. Then it parses the response and prints it out in a readable ...