Thread Ripper

Thread ripper is a tool coded in C# and as it's name suggest it's a link ripping tool from threads(web forums)It is designed for special case scenarios like you had a 1000 page pictures thread in any web forum and you accidentally deleted all those images from your HDD,and want to recollect them all.Then thread ripper can be a good solution for you.

how it works......
STEP 1.
first find the target thread you want to grab pics/links from.
suppose it's http://www.whitegadget.com/pc-wallpapers/3853-katrina-kaif-wallpaper.html
now this thread has 45 pages.

STEP 2.
Analyze the link structure

if don't already know,this window opens by right clicking on any image and selecting view image info in Firefox,you can directly see page source if this option is unavailable to you for some reason.As you can see all images in this thread starts with http://www.whitegadget.com/attachments/ so it will be much easier to find now.

STEP 3.
Setting thread ripper

We already know that we are using this
 http://www.whitegadget.com/pc-wallpapers/3853-katrina-kaif-wallpaper.html
thread as target.So lets see how pages are managed in this thread,try to copy the link for page 2
http://www.whitegadget.com/pc-wallpapers/3853-katrina-kaif-wallpaper-2.html
similarly
http://www.whitegadget.com/pc-wallpapers/3853-katrina-kaif-wallpaper-3.html
so now we know how pages are managed in this thread or we can say this web-forum.

1. Target URL :  http://www.whitegadget.com/pc-wallpapers/3853-katrina-kaif-wallpaper-
(Note: we are going to use multi page option here and  the page no. will be added after the url so we are not using .html at the end of the target URL,if you are going to use a single page then you have to paste the complete URL.)


2. Search for : http://www.whitegadget.com/attachments/

3. Stop at : border="0"

Why? because when you open page source and analyze the link it will look like this.........

< img src="http://www.whitegadget.com/attachments/pc-wallpapers/2826d1199878479-katrina-kaif-wallpaper-katrinainterweb1.jpg" border="0" alt="Name: Katrinainterweb1.jpg Views: 28465 Size: 79.9 KB" />

and we just need  http://www.whitegadget.com/attachments/............................jpg   part of all images,that's why.

4. Enable multy page option,now you can enter range of page no. you want to grab the links.
5. we are going to start from page 1
6. to page 5
7.  Have to add .html at the end of the link.
8. lets run this puppy.

9. 168 links found! You can save this links in a text file and import it to IDM or any other download manager.

There are some other options which i didn't mention yet,lets talk about that.

- Replace : With
This feature is useful when downloading images from thumbnails etc.For example some host like http://picscrazy.com didn't allow direct linking of images instead they provide thumbnails of images.
so the link in the forum looks like this...
http://picscrazy.com/thumb/abcd.jpg 
but the link for original image will be...
http://picscrazy.com/image/abcd.jpg 
So in such case you can replace thumb with image.

-offline sorting
This feature allows you to edit the resultant links in offline mode,keep reading for more detail on this option

Target URL : http://forums.superiorpics.com/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php/topics/3481355#Post3481355
In this thread images are from different sources(different servers) so we have to grab all the image links in it and filter the links we want.

If you can see,there are many different image links including forum avatars,signatures,adds and some html parts,lets clean this mess.The links we are interested in,starts with http://img and ends with ".
Enable the offline sorting,two buttons will be enabled inside it.First one << is a back button if any thing goes wrong you can go back to previous result.The second one performs the sorting,just enter what to search,where to stop and replace:with (optional) and press this button.like this......

After sorting we have left only with plain image links that we were interested.

 -Save Settings
Simple and sweet save settings button saves all the information in the Search for,Stop At,Replace,With text boxes in the settings.ini file,so you can use them later to search links from the same thread or web-forum.

That's all folks. :)

Download Thread Ripper-
http://praveenverma.co.nr/support/Thread_ripper.rar

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How to display a selected part of HTML file using file_get_contents()

The PHP's file_get_contents() function can read a entire HTML page into a string.And we can use this function to get a page from internet and to display only the specified area we want,for example : 
if a file http://any_page.html has following design elements 

<html>
<body>
<div class='main'>
some content
</div>
<div class='extra'>
some unneeded content
</div>
</body>
</html>

and if we want to display only <div class='main'>some content</div> part in our webpage then we need to find out position of string <div class='main'> as the start point and position of string <div class='extra'> as a end point.To do that we need 3 more functions of PHP that are strpos()  strlen() and substr().

substr() : Returns the position of the first occurrence of matched string.
(note: there is a difference between strpos() and strrpos() ) 
strpos() : Returns the portion of string with "strat point" and "length" as parameters.
strlen() : Returns the length of the given string.


now with the knowledge of this functions you can use some function like this

<?php
function get_selected_area($strat_string,$end_string,$page_address) 
{
$whole_html = file_get_contents($page_address);
$strat_point = strpos($whole_html,$strat_string) ;
$end_point = strpos($whole_html,$end_string);
$length_of_needed_string = ($end_point - $strat_point) - 1; //because we don't want "<" in the end
$needed_part_of_html = substr($whole_html,$strat_point,$length_of_needed_string); 
return  $needed_part_of_html;
}
?>

Now if you put this function in a separate php file and use it via include() or require() the following function can be used any where in any page like

<?php  
echo get_selected_area("<div class='main'>","<div class='extra'>","http://any_page.html");
?>

 NOTE: The string chosen for strat and end must satisfy the HTML standards,for example :
 you can't do something like

<?php  
echo get_selected_area("<div class='main'>","</div>","http://any_page.html");
?>

as a HTML page may have several </div> even before the <div class='main'> and this will surely give you some hard time. 

You can also use this alternative function if you want it's short in code.

<?php
function get_selected_area($strat_string,$end_string,$page_address) 
{

$whole_html = file_get_contents($page_address);
$strat_point = strpos($whole_html,$strat_string) ;
$end_point = strpos($whole_html,$end_string);                                        for($i=$strat_point;$i < $end_point;$i++)                                          $needed_part_of_html = $whole_html[$i];
return $needed_part_of_html;
}
?>

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