NAME

NAME
WWW::Baidu - Perl interface for the www.baidu.com search engine

VERSION
This document describes version 0.06 of "WWW::Baidu", released Jan 21,
2007.

SYNOPSIS
use WWW::Baidu;
my $baidu = WWW::Baidu->new;
# ensure the keys are in the GBK/GB2312 encoding if they're Chinese
my $count = $baidu->search('Perl "Larry Wall"', 'Audrey');
$baidu->limit(200);
while (my $record = $baidu->next) {
# the results are in GBK/GB2312 encoding
print $record->title, "\n",
$record->url, "\n",
$record->summary, "\n",
$record->date, "\n",
$record->size, "\n",
$record->cached_url, "\n\n\n";
}

DESCRIPTION
Baidu.com is a very popular Chinese search engine which does similar
things as Google. This module provides you with a Perl interface to that
site.

METHODS
"$obj = WWW::Baidu->new()"
"$obj = WWW::Baidu->new( cache => $cache )"
This is the constructor for "WWW::Baidu". It accepts an optional
argument which will must be a Cache::Cache-compatible object.
"WWW::Baidu" will use this cache instead of a default
"Cache::FileCache" instance.

"$count = $obj->search($key1, $key2, ...)"
Searches Baidu by the given keys and returns the total records
reported by Baidu. Note that the return value $count is only an
estimation by Baidu. Usually it's not equal to the total number of
records that you can fetch by the "next" method.

It's highly recommended to pass only string keys in the GBK or
GB2312 encoding.

A call of this method will clear the internal search results' buffer
and the iterator counter, but the "limit" setting is left intact.

"$obj->limit($count)"
Limits the total number of records WWW::Baidu will try to offer.
This method will affect the "next()" method. And the internal
counter will also get cleared if the "search" method is called
again.

"$record = $obj->next()"
Returns the next search result which is a WWW::Baidu::Record object.
"WWW::Baidu" accesses the baidu.com site rather lazily. That is, it
only "clicks" the "Next page" link in case that the user has fetched
all the records in the internal buffer.

When there's no more records (due to the capability of Baidu itself
or the upper-limit set via the "limit" method), this method will
return undef.

CACHING
"WWW::Baidu" uses WWW::Mechanize::Cached internally so that your program
will run much faster during debugging and will also behave more politely
to the Baidu.com site.

CAVEAT
* The values returned by the WWW::Baidu::Record objects' properties
are always in the GBK (or GB2312) encoding. If you want unicode
semantics, please decode the results using the Encode module
yourself. :)

It's not a bug in WWW::Baidu.

* Althogh "WWW::Baidu" has tried very hard to behave politely to
Baidu.com via both caching, limiting, and lazy iteration, it's still
important for the user not to abuse it.

During debugging, it's highly recommended to fix your search keys
fed into the "search" method, so that "WWW::Baidu" can take
advantage of the caching facility and your scripts will also run
swiftly without the pain of accessing the web.

Please don't punish others' sites for your own programming mistakes.
:)

CODE COVERAGE
I use Devel::Cover to test the code coverage of my tests, below is the
Devel::Cover report on this module test suite.

---------------------------- ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------
File stmt bran cond sub pod time total
---------------------------- ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------
blib/lib/WWW/Baidu.pm 98.1 84.6 66.7 100.0 100.0 100.0 93.9
blib/lib/WWW/Baidu/Record.pm 100.0 n/a n/a 100.0 n/a 0.0 100.0
Total 98.2 84.6 66.7 100.0 100.0 100.0 94.3
---------------------------- ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------

SOURCE CONTROL
You can always get the latest source code from the following Subversion
repos:

<https://svn.openfoundry.org/wwwbaidu>

It has anonymous access to all.

If you like to get a commit bit, please let me know. I've been trying to
follow Audrey's best practices. ;)

AUTHOR
Agent Zhang <[email protected]>

COPYRIGHT
Copyright (c) 2007 by Agent Zhang. All rights reserved.

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself.

SEE ALSO
WWW::Baidu::Record, <http://www.baidu.com>, WWW::Mechanize::Cached.