In Ruby, the Mechanize library is used for automating web interactions, including scraping. You can set up a new instance of a Mechanize browser by first installing the Mechanize gem, and then initializing a new Mechanize object in your Ruby script.
To install the Mechanize gem, you would run the following command in your terminal:
gem install mechanize
Once the gem is installed, you can create a new Mechanize browser instance with the following Ruby code:
require 'mechanize'
# Create a new Mechanize browser instance
agent = Mechanize.new
# Optionally, you can customize the browser instance, for example:
agent.user_agent_alias = 'Mac Safari' # Set the user-agent to Safari on macOS
The Mechanize.new call initializes a new Mechanize browser object, which you can then use to navigate web pages, submit forms, click links, handle cookies, and so on.
Here's a simple example of using the Mechanize browser to get the content of a webpage:
# Create a new Mechanize browser instance
agent = Mechanize.new
# Fetch a web page
page = agent.get('http://example.com')
# Output the page title
puts "Title: #{page.title}"
# Output the page body
puts page.body
This example demonstrates fetching a page and printing its title and body. With Mechanize, you can also perform more complex tasks like logging into websites, following links, and scraping data from pages.
Keep in mind that web scraping should be done responsibly, respecting the website's robots.txt rules and terms of service, and not overloading the website's servers with too many requests in a short period of time.
