Incompatible with crystal v1.1.1

[AmitPress]

The project uses now incompatible apis of crystal v0.33.0 like URI.full_path and others which are deprecated in crystal v1.1.1, that's why the library become unusable with the latest versions. A rewrite for v1.1.1 must needed.

[frnco]

This is actually incompatible with Crystal 1.0.0 and anything above that, since it relies on URI's instance method full_path which was removed on 1.0.0. This is probably not the only cause for the incompatibility, and seeing as this project had no updates in a couple years, using something else seems to be the best choice, rather than patching this up.

A seemingly good alternative is Mechanize. I'm just making this switch on a slightly older personal project I came back to, and I have no affiliation whatsoever to the project, I just thought it might be nice to make it easier for anyone coming here to find an alternative.

Be warned, though, Mechanize doesn't look like the most regularly-maintained project either. That said, as far as my needs took me, it ran fine on Crystal 1.4.1 (The most recent version I have installed), and my Arachnid code needed only minimal adjustments to run with it, to give the specifics for my specific case, which please keep in mind is very basic:

• Arachnid::Agent.new became simply Mechanize.new
• The ugly-nested-blocks below:

  agent.site(url) do
    agent.on_html do |page| 
      ...
    end
  end
  

  became simply page = agent.get url

And that was it. I already used .css to select stuff, using string css-selectors, which also works in Mechanize, so it was even easier than I expected to make the switch. This is anecdotal evidence, but it's all I can offer, and I believe it's better than nothing, at least for anyone looking for an alternative who has absolutely no information on the alternatives.

Also, I'd like to take the opportunity to thank @watzon for Arachnid and Marionette. I did use Arachnid in quite a few personal projects, there are still a bunch of binaries I sometimes use that were built with it, and the same goes for Marionette, so, thank you. Perhaps you could add a note to the readme about Arachnid being incompatible with recent Crystal versions, with link(s) to one or more alternatives.

Again, thanks for sharing this Chris!

[watzon]

Yeah I haven't had the time or desire to really work on this project anymore as of late. I'd be happy to add Mechanize to the README and archive this project.