Patent Downloading Fun With Hpricot

So a good friend of mine reads a lot of patents for work. He hates reading them on the computer and prefers to archive them with hard copies. The process was tedious, because the Patent Office website generally blows and does not offer an archived download of all the images. So he was manually control + click, save as downloading each image and then organizing them. What a waste of time, right?

Ruby to the rescue! I grabbed Hpricot, enabled Firebug, and headed to the Google Patents web site and started hacking. Thirty minutes and ~fifty lines of code later I had completed work on )).

Maybe someone else will find it useful or a good reference on how to work with Hpricot. Enjoy!