How do I download a picture using Ruby?

Question

I want to download this picture using Ruby. How do I do that?

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/92/218926700_ecedc5fef7_o.jpg

I am using Mac O

Answer 1

Try using the Mechanize gem:

Start with: sudo gem install mechanize to install Mechanize.

Then:

require 'rubygems'
require 'mechanize'

agent = Mechanize.new
link = 'http://www.asite.com/pic.jpg'
agent.get(link).save "images/pic.jpg" 

EDIT: To make things cleaner I would suggest you use the File's name itself when you save the image. I had an issue saving bulk images because they were not formated correctly. The images were saved like this:

#pic.jpg(1)
#pic.jpg(2)
#etc.

Thats why you should probably use the image name as the file name like this:

agent.get(src).save "images/#{File.basename(url)}"

File.basename takes the image url and just returns the the actual image name:

File.basename("http://www.asite.com/pic.jpg")
# returns the image name
pic.jpg