Using WWW:Mechanize to download a file to disk without loading it all in memory first

Question

I'm using Mechanize to facilitate the downloading of some files. At the moment my script uses the following line to actually download the files...

agent.get('http://example.com/foo').save_as 'a_file_name'

However this downloads the complete file into memory before dumping it to disk. How do you bypass this behavior, and simply download straight to disk? If I need to use something other than WWW:Mechanize then how would I go about using WWW:Mechanize's cookies with it?

Answer 1

What you really want is the Mechanize::Download

http://mechanize.rubyforge.org/Mechanize/Download.html

you can use this way:

require 'mechanize'

agent = Mechanize.new
agent.pluggable_parser.default = Mechanize::Download
agent.get('http://example.com/foo').save('a_file_name')

Answer 2

Have you looked at Mechanize::FileSaver? It looks like it can do what you require.

Here is an example that saves all the PDF files it encounters:

require 'rubygems'
require 'mechanize'

agent = Mechanize.new
agent.pluggable_parser.pdf = Mechanize::FileSaver
agent.get('http://example.com/foo.pdf')