Task

Create a program that downloads the time from this URL:   http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/timer.pl   and then prints the current UTC time by extracting just the UTC time from the web page's HTML. Alternatively, if the above url is not working, grab the first date/time off this page's talk page.



If possible, only use libraries that come at no extra monetary cost with the programming language and that are widely available and popular such as CPAN for Perl or Boost for C++.




rebol [
  Title: "Web Scraping"
  URL: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Web_Scraping
]
 
; Notice that REBOL understands unquoted URL's:
 
service: http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/timer.pl
 
; The 'read' function can read from any data scheme that REBOL knows
; about, which includes web URLs. NOTE: Depending on your security
; settings, REBOL may ask you for permission to contact the service.
 
html: read service
 
; I parse the HTML to find the first <br> (note the unquoted HTML tag
; -- REBOL understands those too), then copy the current time from
; there to the "UTC" terminator.
 
; I have the "to end" in the parse rule so the parse will succeed.
; Not strictly necessary once I've got the time, but good practice.
 
parse html [thru <br> copy current thru "UTC" to end]
 
print ["Current UTC time:" current]