Can I use MechanicalSoup to monitor a website for changes?

Yes, you can use MechanicalSoup to monitor a website for changes. MechanicalSoup is a Python library that provides a simple way to automate interaction with websites. It's built on top of requests for HTTP requests and BeautifulSoup for parsing HTML.

To monitor a website for changes, you can write a script that periodically fetches the content of the website, parses it, and compares it with the previous version of the content. If there are any differences, it means that the website has changed.

Here's a basic example of how you might set up a script to monitor a website for changes using MechanicalSoup:

import mechanicalsoup
import hashlib
import time

# Compare the hash of the webpage content
def has_website_changed(url, previous_hash):
    browser = mechanicalsoup.StatefulBrowser()
    browser.open(url)
    current_page = browser.page
    current_hash = hashlib.md5(current_page.encode('utf-8')).hexdigest()
    return current_hash != previous_hash, current_hash

# URL to monitor
url_to_monitor = 'http://example.com'
# Check every 60 seconds
check_interval = 60

# Initial hash (empty string will ensure the first check always shows a change)
previous_hash = ''

while True:
    changed, current_hash = has_website_changed(url_to_monitor, previous_hash)
    if changed:
        print(f"Website {url_to_monitor} has changed.")
        # Here you can add your code to handle the change (send a notification, etc.)

    # Update the previous hash
    previous_hash = current_hash
    # Wait for the specified interval before checking again
    time.sleep(check_interval)

In this example, the has_website_changed function takes a URL and the previous hash of its content as arguments. It uses MechanicalSoup to fetch the current content of the page, hashes it, and compares it to the previous hash. It returns a boolean indicating whether the website has changed, along with the new hash.

The script then enters an infinite loop, periodically checking the website for changes using this function. If a change is detected, it prints a message to the console. You could modify the script to send an email, log the change, or take some other action when a change is detected.

Keep in mind: - Rate Limiting: Make sure you respect the website's robots.txt file and terms of service. Don't check for changes too frequently, as this may be considered abusive behavior and could lead to your IP being blocked. - Dynamic Content: Some websites have dynamic content that changes frequently or on every visit. This can lead to false positives, so you may need to refine your comparison logic to focus on the specific parts of the page that are of interest. - JavaScript-Rendered Content: MechanicalSoup does not execute JavaScript, so it may not be suitable for monitoring websites that rely heavily on JavaScript to render content. In such cases, you might need to use a tool like Selenium or Puppeteer that can control a real browser.

Remember to install MechanicalSoup if you haven't already:

pip install MechanicalSoup

This is a simple example, and there are many ways you could expand on this to create a more robust and feature-rich website monitoring tool.