---
title: File Page Example
---
# file page example
Let's look at this page: [https://gelbooru.com/index.php?page=post&s=view&id=3837615](https://gelbooru.com/index.php?page=post&s=view&id=3837615).
What sorts of data are we interested in here?
* The image URL.
* The different tags and their namespaces.
* The secret md5 hash buried in the HTML.
* The post time.
* The Deviant Art source URL.
## the file url { id="the_file_url" }
A tempting strategy for pulling the file URL is to just fetch the src of the embedded `#!html ` and `#!html ` tags.
* If the booru shows 'sample' sizes for large images--as this one does!--pulling the src of the image you see won't get the full-size original for large images.
If you have an account with the site you are parsing and have clicked the appropriate 'Always view original' setting, you may not see these sorts of sample-size banners! I recommend you log out of/go incognito for sites you are inspecting for hydrus parsing (unless a log-in is required to see content, so the hydrus user will have to set up hydrus-side login to actually use the parser), or you can easily NSFW-gates and other logged-out hurdles.
When trying to pin down the right link, if there are no good alternatives, you often have to write several File URL rules with different precedence, saying 'get the "Click Here to See Full Size" link at 75' and 'get the embed's "src" at 25' and so on to make sure you cover different situations, but as it happens Gelbooru always posts the actual File URL at:
* `#!html Original image ` which can be found by putting a String Match in the html formula.
`#!html FUCK ALL TIMEZONES FOREVER
Gelbooru offers--
```html
Posted: 2017-08-18 19:59:44jayage5ds
```
--so let's see how we can turn that into a Unix timestamp:
I find the `#!html ` that starts "Posted: " and then decode the date according to the hackery-dackery-doo format from [here](https://docs.python.org/2/library/datetime.html#strftime-and-strptime-behavior). `%c` and `%z` are unreliable, and attempting timezone adjustments is overall a supervoid that will kill your time for no real benefit--subs and watchers work fine with 12-hour imprecision, so if you have a +0300 or EST in your string, just cut those characters off with another String Transformation. As long as you are getting about the right day, you are fine.
## source url { id="source_url" }
Source URLs are nice to have if they are high quality. Some boorus only ever offer artist profiles, like `https://twitter.com/artistname`, whereas we want singular Post URLs that point to other places that host this work. For Gelbooru, you could fetch the Source URL as we did source time, searching for "Source: ", but they also offer more easily in an edit form:
```html
` is probably firmer, but I expect I wrote it before I had String Matches in. It works for now, which in this game is often Good Enough™.
Also--be careful pulling from text or tooltips rather than an href-like attribute, as whatever is presented to the user may be clipped for longer URLs. Make sure you try your rules on a couple of different pages to make sure you aren't pulling "https://www.deviantart.com/art/Lara..." by accident anywhere!
## summary { id="summary" }
Phew--all that for a bit of Lara Croft! Thankfully, most sites use similar schemes. Once you are familiar with the basic idea, the only real work is to duplicate an existing parser and edit for differences. Our final parser looks like this:
This is overall a decent parser. Some parts of it may fail when Gelbooru update to their next version, but that can be true of even very good parsers with multiple redundancy. For now, hydrus can use this to quickly and efficiently pull content from anything running Gelbooru 0.2.5., and the effort spent now can save millions of combined _right-click->save as_ and manual tag copies in future. If you make something like this and share it about, you'll be doing a good service for those who could never figure it out.