Read a local HTML file with Mechanize

Question

I am building a crawler, I know how to use ruby mechanize to read a page from the net using this code:

require 'mechanize'
agent = Mechanize.new
agent.get "http://google.com"

But can I use Mechanize to read an HTML file from the file system? How?

Answer 1

just using the file:// protocol worked great for me:

html_dir = File.dirname(__FILE__)
page = agent.get("file:///#{html_dir}/example-file.html")

and about the raised question why someone would use mechanize to read local html files: I found it necessary for testing purposes - just store an example file locally and run your rspec against it.