Declarations

Declarations

Most recipe sites publish schema.org markup, and the gem reads it with no site code. A declaration is for a site whose markup is missing or wrong. It says where a field is on the page, with a CSS selector.

RecipeScrapers.register "russianfood.com" do
  encoding "windows-1251"
  title "h1"
  ingredients rows: "tr.ingr_tr_0, tr.ingr_tr_1"
  instructions rows: "div.step_n"
end

A declared field replaces what the markup says. Every field left out still comes from the markup, so a site that gets only the yields wrong declares only yields. MDN has a guide to CSS selectors.

Single values

title, author, description, site_name, language, category, cuisine, cooking_method, image, yields, total_time, prep_time and cook_time take a selector. The gem reads the text of the first element that matches.

title "h1.recipe-title"
yields ".recipe-servings"
total_time ".recipe-time-total"

Times and yields are read the same way as in schema.org, so 1 hour 15 minutes gives a total_time of 75.

Lists

ingredients, instructions, keywords and equipment take rows:. Every element that matches is one line, read as the page shows it, without a list marker such as - or 1. .

ingredients rows: ".recipe-ingredients li"
instructions rows: ".recipe-steps li"

Two options cover the common layouts that are not one element per line:

Option	For
split: true	a whole list in one element, one line per <br> or paragraph
skip: "<selector>"	something inside a row that is not part of the text, such as a step number

ingredients rows: ".recipe-ingredients p", split: true
instructions rows: ".recipe-step", skip: ".step-number"

When a site generates class names with a random suffix, such as ingredients_recipeYield__DN65p, match the part that stays:

yields "[class*='ingredients_recipeYield']"

Ingredient groups

The gem finds ingredient groups on its own on sites built with WP Recipe Maker, Tasty Recipes and Create by Mediavine, and in a list whose headings end with a colon, such as For the sauce:. Any other layout declares where the headings are:

ingredient_groups heading: ".ingredient-group h4", item: ".ingredient-group li"

item has to match the ingredient lines and nothing else. When the headings are lines of a split row, declare heading alone:

ingredients rows: ".ingredients p", split: true
ingredient_groups heading: ".ingredients strong"

Encoding

A site that sends a legacy encoding without naming it in its headers declares it:

encoding "windows-1251"

Parsing ingredients or nutrients differently

A declaration can put a parser of its own in front of the bundled one, for this site only. See Parsers.

RecipeScrapers.register "example.com" do
  parser :ingredients, ExampleIngredients, RecipeScrapers::Parsers::Ingredients
end

When selectors are not enough

A site whose markup is there but needs reading in its own way gets a Scraper subclass instead of a declaration. lib/recipe_scrapers/sites/de/chefkoch.rb is a short example.