Is there a way to follow meta refresh redirects with HTTParty?

HTTParty is a popular Ruby gem for making HTTP requests. It is simple and intuitive to use, but it does not natively support following meta refresh redirects. Meta refresh is a means of instructing a web browser to automatically refresh the current web page or frame after a given time interval, and it can also be used for redirection.

Since meta refresh is a client-side redirect that occurs within the HTML content of the response, HTTParty's automatic redirection handling won't catch it. HTTParty can handle standard HTTP redirects (like 301 or 302), but a meta refresh would require parsing the HTML content to extract the URL and then manually issuing a new request.

Here is a simple example of how you might handle a meta refresh redirect manually using HTTParty and Nokogiri (a Ruby gem for parsing HTML and XML):

First, make sure to install the necessary gems:

gem install httparty
gem install nokogiri

Then you can use the following Ruby script to follow meta refresh redirects:

require 'httparty'
require 'nokogiri'

def follow_meta_refresh(url)
  response = HTTParty.get(url)

  # Check for a meta refresh tag
  doc = Nokogiri::HTML(response.body)
  meta_refresh = doc.at('meta[http-equiv="refresh"]')

  if meta_refresh
    content = meta_refresh['content']
    refresh_time, refresh_url = content.split(';').map(&:strip)
    if refresh_url =~ /url=(.+)/i
      redirect_url = $1.strip
      # Handle relative URLs
      redirect_url = URI.join(url, redirect_url).to_s unless redirect_url.start_with?('http')
      puts "Meta refresh redirect found, following to: #{redirect_url}"
      follow_meta_refresh(redirect_url)
    end
  else
    puts "No meta refresh redirect found."
    response
  end
end

url = 'http://example.com/page_with_meta_refresh'
final_response = follow_meta_refresh(url)
puts final_response.body

This script defines a follow_meta_refresh method that fetches the given URL using HTTParty, then uses Nokogiri to parse the HTML response and look for a meta refresh tag. If it finds one, it extracts the URL and follows it, doing this recursively until there are no more meta refresh redirects.

Please note that this script assumes the meta refresh tag follows the typical format:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5;url=http://example.com/">

Also, this script does not handle the refresh time (it follows the redirect immediately), and there is no error handling for other possible edge cases (such as malformed meta refresh tags). You'll want to add appropriate error handling for production code.

Keep in mind that following redirects automatically without respecting the time delay or user interaction may not align with the intended use of the site and could potentially be against the terms of service of some websites. Always ensure you comply with the legal and ethical guidelines when scraping or automating interactions with websites.