Result Filters

In A-Parser there is a possibility to filter results by a set of specific rules and save only the necessary data to the result.

Using filtering

Main use cases:

Saving only those links that contain a specific string occurrence (e.g., a CMS footprint)
Filtering a database of domains by specific parameters (e.g., Yandex SQI from 300, language RU)
Checking the server response (e.g., 200 OK or the presence of specific headers)
Checking if the original query is present in the snippet
Any other use cases where it is required to limit results by specific conditions

Filters can be added in the Task Editor by clicking on the tool icon next to the required parser:

Filtering types

You can filter both single results and arrays of results. There are several types of filters:

By equality or inequality of strings
By presence or absence of a substring occurrence
By matching or not matching a regular expression
Numeric values can be filtered by greater than, less than, and equality

tip

Features

When filtering arrays of results, only the results that match the filter remain in the array
When filtering simple results, if a result does not match the filter, the result for this query is skipped entirely, including when using multiple parsers
When using two or more filters in a task, a logical AND is applied between them; in other words, the result will be saved only if it matches the conditions of all filters simultaneously
When comparing in the value field (string, regular expression, or numeric value), you can use the Template Toolkit template engine; all variables similar to those for the General result format are available

Examples

Filtering by text on a page

Checking a database of sites for the presence of specific text on a page
As queries, we use a file with links; as a result, we get a filtered file with links where the searched text is found.

We use the Net::HTTP parser to download the target page, saving the query (the link being checked) to the result. We filter the $data result - the content of the downloaded page, setting the filter type to Contains string and specifying the string itself:

Filtering images by size

Filtering images by resolution
Filter the height and width of the image when parsing via SE::Google::Images, saving only those images that are larger than 500x500 pixels:

Filtering by several attributes

Filtering links by the occurrence of any of several different strings
To filter links by several different strings, we will use the ability to specify regular expressions; for this, we write several attributes via a separator:

showthread\.php
/forum/
viewtopic\.php\?t=

note

Note that regular expressions require escaping a number of characters

Using a query in a filter

Saving Google snippets that contain the original query
As a string for comparison, we explicitly specify [% query %] - the variable that contains the query, and select Case sensitive to search for the substring considering the character case:

Using filtering​

Filtering types​

Features​

Examples​

Filtering by text on a page​

Filtering images by size​

Filtering by several attributes​

Using a query in a filter​