This repository contains my solution for the "Hacker News Scraper Test".
- Removed unnecessary library reference to
Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi.Client. This was left over from an earlier iteration. - Fixed an issue where job posts would cause the scrape to fail. I did not encounter this case during my initial implementation, so I wasn't aware it was a valid scenario. Note: Job posts conflict with the "author is a non empty string" requirement, as they have no author. Because of this, in the case of job posts in the range being scraped, they will simply be ommitted from the results output to the console. (This may mean that the rank of the last scraped post is greater than the number of posts requested.)
- While using a third party Hacker News API was not allowed, there is an official Hacker News API. I assumed that the purpose of this exercise was to write a tool which scraped the Hacker News HTML rather than one which called their API.
This project requires the .NET Core 2.2 SDK installed in order to build and run the application. If this is not the case, download and install the appropriate SDK version for your platform from The official .NET Core 2.2 Downloads Page.
Run build.bat from the root directory. This will build, test, and publish the project. The final project will be published to the ./bin directory.
To run, having run build.bat, run (from the ./bin directory):
dotnet .\HackerNewsCli.dll --posts <number-of-posts>
The application can be built and run using the supplied Dockerfile.
To do so, run
docker build . -t hackernews
followed by
docker run hackernews --posts 25
AngleSharpandAngleSharp.IOare used for the parsing of HTML into a DOM and querying the DOM using CSS selectors.Newtonsoft.Jsonwas used for JSON serialization when formatting data for STDOUT.Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration.BinderandMicrosoft.Extensions.Configuration.CommandLinewere used to facilitate parsing of command line arguments.Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjectionwas included to allow the .NET Core IoC container to be used in order to wire up the components of the application.NUnit,NUnit3TestAdapter,Microsoft.NET.Test.SdkandMoqare used to enable unit testing.