NAME¶

News::Scan - gather and report Usenet newsgroup statistics

SYNOPSIS¶

    use News::Scan;
    my $scan = News::Scan->new;

DESCRIPTION¶

This module provides a class whose objects can be used to gather and report Usenet newsgroup statistics.

CONSTRUCTOR¶

new ( [ OPTIONS ] )

"OPTIONS" is a list of named parameters (i.e. given in key-value pairs). Valid options are

Group

The value of this option is the name of the newsgroup you wish to scan.

From

The value of this option should be either 'spool' or 'NNTP' (case is not significant). Any other value will produce an error (see the "error" method description below). A value of 'spool' indicates that you would like to scan articles in a spool (see the Spool option below). A value of 'NNTP' indicates that articles should be retrieved from your NNTP server (see the NNTPServer option below).

Spool

The value of this option should be the path to the spool directory that contains the articles you would like to scan. This option is ignored unless the value of From is 'spool'.

NNTPServer

The value of this option (in the form server:port, with both being optional--see Net::NNTP for the semantics of omitting one or both of these parameters) indicates the NNTP server from which to retrieve articles. This option is ignored unless From is 'NNTP'. See the description of the NNTPAuthLogin and NNTPAuthPasswd options below.

NNTPAuthLogin

The value of this option should be a valid NNTP authentication login for your NNTP server. This option is only necessary if your NNTP server requires authentication.

NNTPAuthPasswd

The value of this option should be the password corresponding to the login in NNTPAuthLogin. Having this hardcoded in a script is evil, and there should be a much better way.

Period

The value of this option indicates the length of the period (in days) immediately prior to invocation of the program from which you would like to scan articles. The default period is seven (7) days.

QuoteRE

The value of this option is a Perl regular expression that accepts quoted lines and rejects unquoted or original lines. The default regular expression is "^\s{0,3}(?:"|:|\S+>|\+\+)>.

Exclude

The value of this option should be a reference to an array containing regular expressions that accept email addresses of posters whose articles you wish to ignore.

Aliases

The value of this option should be a reference to a hash whose keys are email addresses that should be transformed into the email addresses that are their corresponding values, i.e. "alias =" 'real@address'>.

METHODS¶

configure ( [ OPTIONS ] )

"OPTIONS" is a list of named parameters identical to those accepted by "new". Re-"configure"-ing an object after scanning is probably a bad idea. This method returns "undef" if it encounters an error.

The following methods are the actual underlying methods used to set and retrieve the configuration options of the same name (modulo case):

name ( [ NEWSGROUP-NAME ] )

spool ( [ SPOOL-DIRECTORY ] )

period ( [ INTERVAL-LENGTH ] )

aliases ( [ ALIASES-HASHREF ] )

from ( 'NNTP' | 'spool' )

quote_re ( [ QUOTE-REGEX-ARRAYREF ] )

exclude ( [ EXCLUSION-REGEX-ARRAYREF ] )

nntp_server ( [ [ NNTP-SERVER ]:[ NNTP-PORT ] ] )

nntp_auth_login ( [ LOGIN ] )

nntp_auth_passwd ( [ PASSWORD ] )

These methods can be used to retrieve information from the "News::Scan" object or ask it to perform some action.

error ( [ MESSAGE ] )

Use this method to determine whether an object has encountered an error condition. The return value of "error" is guaranteed to be 0 after any method completes successfully (except "error"). (Keep in mind that this will also overwrite any previous error message.) If there has been an error, this method should return some useful message.

 

If provided, "MESSAGE" sets the object's error message.

articles

Returns the number of articles accounted for.

volume

Returns the volume of traffic (in bytes) to the newsgroup in the period.

header_volume

Returns the volume (in bytes) generated by headers.

header_lines

Returns the number of lines consumed by headers.

body_volume

Returns the volume (in bytes) generated by message bodies.

body_lines

Returns the number of lines consumed by message bodies.

orig_volume

Returns the volume (in bytes) of text which has been determined to be original (see QuoteRE). Note that original traffic is a subset of body traffic.

orig_lines

Returns the number of lines that are determined to be original.

signatures

Returns the number of messages that had a cutline (/^-- $/).

sig_volume

Returns the volume (in bytes) generated by signatures.

sig_lines

Returns the number of lines consumed by signatures.

earliest ( [ TIME ] )

Use this method to determine the date (in seconds since the Epoch) that the oldest article found within the period was posted to Usenet.

 

If "TIME" is given, it is treated as a candidate for the earliest article. If "TIME" is successful (i.e. is less than the previous earliest), this method returns 1, else 0.

latest ( [ TIME ] )

Use this method to determine the date (in seconds since the Epoch) that the youngest article found within the period was posted to Usenet.

 

If "TIME" is given, it is treated as a candidate for the latest article. If "TIME" is successful (i.e. is greater than the previous latest), this method returns 1, else 0.

excludes

Returns the list of regular expressions used to determine whether an article from a given email address should be ignored.

posters

Returns a reference to a hash whose keys are email addresses and whose values are "News::Scan::Poster" objects corresponding to those email addresses. See News::Scan::Poster.

threads

Returns a reference to a hash whose keys are subjects and whose values are "News::Scan::Thread" objects corresponding to those subjects. See News::Scan::Thread.

crossposts

Returns a reference to a hash whose keys are newsgroup names and whose values are the number of times the corresponding groups have been crossposted to.

collect

Use this method to mirror the articles from the specified NNTP server to the specified spool. Please be kind to the NNTP server.

scan

Instruct the object to gather information about the newsgroup.

EXAMPLES¶

See the eg/ directory in the News-Scan distribution, available from the CPAN-- http://www.perl.com/CPAN/.

SEE ALSO¶

perlre, News::Scan::Poster, News::Scan::Thread, News::Scan::Article, Net::NNTP

AUTHOR¶

Greg Bacon <gbacon@cs.uah.edu>

COPYRIGHT¶

Copyright (c) 1997 Greg Bacon. All Rights Reserved. This library is free software. You may distribute and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.