urlwatch

urlwatch is a pythonic URL watcher cronjob script.

urlwatch is intended to help you watch URLs and get notified (via e-mail) of any changes. The change notification will include the URL that has changed and a unified diff of what's changed.

urlwatch works out of a single directory, so no need to install anything. State files are kept in the same folder. The script supports stripping always-changing parts of a page through the use of a filter hook function.

What is new in this release:

• This bugfix release corrects an issue related to the html2txt module when used in filter hook scripts.
• It's recommended for all users to upgrade to this release from previous releases.
• No new features have been introduced since the last release.

What is new in version 1.7:

• This version now allows you to convert HTML of Web pages to plain text using either Lynx (via "-dump"), html2text, or simply by stripping all HTML tags via a regular expression. This feature has to be enabled on a per-URL basis in the user-defined hooks.

What is new in version 1.6:

• This release adds support for Python 2.6 and above by using the hashlib module instead of the (deprecated) sha module for generating hashes.
• Python versions before 2.5 are still supported and will use the sha module for generating hashes, just like the previous versions.

What is new in version 1.5:

• Support for system-wide installation was added.
• The ~/.urlwatch/ directory is used for user settings.
• The BSD license is used.
• A setup.py script was added.
• Command-line options and verbose logging mode were added.
• Example files are copied on first start.
• A Unix manual page was added.

What is new in version 1.4:

• This release adds support for cleaning bad HTML (long lines, etc.) with python-utidylib (W3C's HTMLTidy) and adds a module and support for converting iCalendar (*.ics) files to plaintext for easy-to-use iCalendar watching.