Yahoo! Hacks

Program Yahoo! with Ruby

Use a Yahoo! Ruby library to include Yahoo! data in your Ruby scripts.

The Yahoo! Developer Network web site (http://developer.yahoo.net) provides a number of tools to help developers build applications with Yahoo! data. Their Yahoo! Search Web Services software development kit (SDK) includes libraries for various programming languages; Ruby, unfortunately, is not one of them. However, I have developed a Ruby library, which is available at http://premshree.seacrow.com/code/ruby/yahoo-ruby.

The library is easy to use; there’s no “installation” as such. Just copy the contents and place it in any suitable directory. The library is just one file, yahoo-ruby.rb, which you need to place in the lib/ruby/site_ruby directory of your Ruby installation. Once it is in place, whenever you want to use the Ruby API for Yahoo! Search Web Services, simply include require yahoo-ruby in the script. Using this Ruby library means you’ll never have to know how to construct Yahoo! Search Web Services URLs, or even know what the XML looks like. The library handles all of the work of communicating with Yahoo!’s server.

The Code

This simple Ruby script uses the Ruby library to return Yahoo! Web Search responses. Save this code to a file called yahoo_search.rb and be sure to add your own unique application ID:

#!/usr/bin/ruby # yahoo_search.rb # A simple Yahoo! search script using the # Ruby API (http://premshree.seacrow.com/code/ruby/yahoo-ruby) # Usage ruby yahoo_search.rb <query> ...