SE Realtime

SE Realtime is a ruby API for the Stack Exchange real time questions feed. It allows various methods of retrieving questions from that page.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'se-realtime'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install se-realtime

First of all, require it with require 'se/realtime'.

Then, pick a retrevial method:

To simply get exactly what the websocket is spitting out, use the raw retrevial method:

SE::Realtime.ws do |data|
  puts data
end

This will print out exactly what comes out of the websocket (JSON.parsed).

Warning:

The only relevant part here is the data field of the json, which has a string value (because reasons), and so you must JSON.parse(data['data']) to get the real data.

To get a neatly formatted version of the post with nicer keys, use this method. The keys are all symbols:

• site: The simple name of the site
• body: A truncated version of the body of the post (with "..." appended)
• title: The title of the post
• last_active: The timestamp from SE of the last activity.
• site_url: The base url of the site that the post came from
• url: The url of the post
• owner_url: The url of the profile of the owner
• owner_display_name: The display name of the owner
• id: The ID of the post

Syntax:

SE::Realtime.json do |data|
  puts data
end

This also accepts a site: 'sitename' parameter to filter by site.

This is identical to the JSON method, except it takes a batch size and returns an array of Hashes of the size passed. It passes all hash parameters on to json, so you can use filters such as site: 'sitename'.

Syntax:

SE::Realtime.batch 10, site: 'stackoverflow' do |data|
  puts data
end

This will return arrays of 10 stackoverflow posts every time 10 have been retrieved.

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/izwick-schachter/se-realtime.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.