Extract Van Gogh Paintings Carousel

[Simar-malhotra09]

Extract Van Gogh Paintings Carousel

Ruby parser that reads files/van-gogh-paintings.html and extracts each painting's:

• Name
• Extensions
• Link
• Image

The output matches the provided expected-array.json exactly.

All data is parsed from the local HTML file. No network requests are made.

Approach

Identifying carousel items

The main challenge is determining which elements belong to the carousel.

Google's CSS class names are generated and obfuscated (pgNMRc, iELo6, etc.). They do not carry meaning and can change at any time, so the parser does not rely on them.

Instead, carousel items are identified using the stick= query parameter in the link URL. Any <a> element with a /search?...&stick=... URL that wraps an <img> is treated as a carousel item.

This relies on Google's search URL structure rather than presentation specific CSS classes, making it a more stable signal.

Extracting metadata

The painting name and year are read from the innermost text nodes within each anchor element.

The year is only added to extensions when it matches a four digit year:

/\A\d{4}\z/

This prevents title fragments from being incorrectly included in the extensions field.

Image extraction

The HTML contains two thumbnail formats.

Images embedded in scripts

The first set of paintings stores image data inside inline <script> blocks through _setImagesSrc(ii, s) calls.

During initialization, the parser:

1. Extracts the image data from the scripts
2. Decodes escaped characters such as \x3d to =
3. Builds an ID to image lookup table

Images from data-src

The remaining paintings are lazy loaded and expose the image URL directly through the data-src attribute.

These images are read directly from the corresponding <img> elements.

Validation

The parser was tested against three carousel layouts:

File	Items	Content Type
files/van-gogh-paintings.html	47	Artworks, exact match with provided JSON
spec/fixtures/deniro-movies.html	12	Movies
spec/fixtures/shinkai-books.html	12	Books

Running

bin/setup
# Verifies Ruby >= 3.1 and installs dependencies

bundle exec bin/parse files/van-gogh-paintings.html
# Outputs JSON to stdout

bundle exec rspec
# 16 examples, 0 failures