A new xAPP to try!

xAP Data Parser will retrieve the contents of a page from a web site (html, text, xml, anything text based really), run a Regular Expression against the text retrieved and return any matches over xAP.

It requires the latest .net framework and is built using the xFx xAP framework.   I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now and it seems to be stable (only tested on Windows XP SP3).

A GUI version and service version are both available (I’d recommend installing the GUI version first to play with, then uninstall that before installing the service version if desired).

The GUI version can be “driven” from the GUI or by sending data.parser class xAP messages to it whereas the service version only supports the latter.

After either version is installed there should be a “documentation” folder where some example Regular Expressions are given along with details of the xAP Schema used and message samples.

The app has been proving very useful here for retrieving various different bits of data off of the WWW.  By driving it from Floorplan (e.g. sending data.parser messages from a Timer or other event) data can be retrieved automatically with Floorplan then reacting to the retrieved data (e.g.displaying UK Lottery Results on a SqueezeBox).

Download from:

xAPDataParserService.zip
xAPDataParserGUI.zip

Hope you find it as useful as I have!

Let me know if there are any problems and please share back any usage examples (web site & regular expression) for others to use!

Thanks for reading,

Martyn Wendon