Webpage

The Webpage settings let you customize how webpages are downloaded, analyzed, and modified.

The Webpage screen provides the following settings:

Download Using Web Views

Switch this on to have SiteSucker download HTML using hidden web views. When this option is on, SiteSucker will load each webpage into a hidden web view and then extract the HTML from the web view after the page is loaded. This can be useful when webpages are built using JavaScript or when the webpage is an XML file that can be converted into HTML by the web view.

Save Delay

Use this control to specify how long to delay saving a webpage after it has supposedly finished loading in a web view. Some webpages may take longer to load because their content is generated using JavaScript. This setting provides additional time for webpages to finish loading before they are saved. This control is only enabled if the Download Using Web Views setting is on.

Text Encoding

Use this control to specify the text encoding for webpages. SiteSucker will read and save all webpages using the specified text encoding. If it is set to Default, SiteSucker will try to detect the webpage’s text encoding. This setting is ignored when reading or saving webpages that were previously downloaded.

Custom Data Attributes

Use the Custom Data Attributes screen to specify custom data attributes that SiteSucker should scan for URLs. Introduced in HTML5, custom data attributes store extra information, usually for the page’s JavaScript, in standard HTML tags. Data attribute names begin with data- and do not contain uppercase characters.

If you tap the Edit button in the Custom Data Attributes screen, SiteSucker displays a toolbar with the following buttons:

Deletes the selected custom data attributes.

Allows you to edit the selected custom data attribute.

Allows you to add a new custom data attribute.

Patterns

Use the Patterns screen to specify regular expressions to replace text in HTML files or extract URLs from HTML text.

To replace text in HTML files, set the Template Type to Early Substitution or Late Substitution and enter a search pattern and a substitution template for the text you would like to replace. If text is found that matches the search pattern, it is altered in accordance with the substitution template. The template specifies what should be used to replace each match, with the back-reference $0 representing the matched text, $1 representing the contents of the first capture group, and so on. To delete the matched text, enter a blank template.

To extract URLs from HTML text, set the Template Type to URL Extraction and enter a search pattern and a URL template that specifies a URL that SiteSucker should download. The URL template is ignored if it produces a blank URL or a URL that is identical to the template.

The URL Extraction and Early Substitution search patterns are applied before SiteSucker scans HTML files for URLs. The Late Substitution search pattern is applied after HTML files are localized. Search patterns are applied in the order in which they appear in the list, and the order of search patterns can be rearranged by dragging them in the list when editing. The pattern syntax currently supported is that specified by ICU, which is described at Regular Expressions - ICU Documentation.

As an example, in the image shown above, SiteSucker is instructed to do the following:

extract a URL from the first argument of the javascript:openWin() function and then
replace URLs that have a certain query string with the same URL without the query string.

If you tap the Edit button in the Patterns screen, SiteSucker displays a toolbar with the following buttons:

Deletes the selected patterns.

Allows you to edit the selected pattern.

Allows you to add a new pattern.