MensaUnisa/Cacher Proof of Concept

⚠️ This is a proof of concept, which doesn't even work anymore

The UniSa refectory completely overhauled the way they publish menus in such a way that this parser stopped working, and additionally started publishing the menu through conventional social media in an easily accessible way that makes this project, meant to enable a Telegram bot publishing the menu, frankly redundant.

A simple set of scripts that converts University of Salerno's refectory's online published menus to a set of csv tables and also downloads them in three different formats.

Run by running ./execute inside the directory, or put it in your crontab to always keep it updated.

All data downloaded is, obviously, in Italian.

Non-POSIX Dependencies

The software should run with both GNU and BusyBox coreutils, plus the following:

• curl
• perl
• poppler-utils (specifically, pdftotext, and pdftoppm if running with the CONVERT_PNG option)
• Liberation fonts or Arial and Times New Roman fonts (if running with CONVERT_PNG option)

Variables

STARTING_ID: Files for the UniSa's refectory are stored on the ADiSURC server with an unique numerical ID. The software scrapes all of them starting from either the latest ID processed or $STARTING_ID if it's the first time it's run. By default this is 3335, but it'll get probably updated when file number 3335 becomes too old.

DATADIR: The directory where you're storing the csv database and the files subdirectory containing the various files downloaded and converted. Default value is $HOME/adisurc.

CONVERT_PNG: Enables PNG conversion if set to any value. It is toggleable because it requires the installation of extra fonts and may consume unneeded space.

Storage Formats

The menus are stored in the following formats (id is used here in place of the file's ID on the ADiSURC website):

Raw PDF (id.pdf)

This is the PDF as it's stored on the ADiSuRC's servers. Currently it means it gets converted from a (probably) manually-generated Word document, but this might change in the future. We'll take care of that when we get there.

PNG (id.png)

This is the PDF file converted to PNG through pdftoppm.

Text (id.txt)

This is the PDF file converted to a text file in the following format:

First servings
---
Second servings
---
Third servings ("Contorno"s)
---
Contents of the Take-Away Basket

Every one of these servings is a list of possible meals for that serving, separated by a newline (\n).

CSV

The data is also stored in two semicolon-separated CSV tables, stored in $DATADIR.

menus.csv

This table contains data about the individual menus.

Each row has the following three columns, in order:

• id is the numeric id of the file that corresponds to the menu on the ADiSURC servers. This is supposed to be unique;
• date is the date corresponding to the menu, in YYYYMMDD format;
• meal is the specific meal represented. It can be 0 for lunch, and 1 for dinner

Note that there might be multiple menus for the same day (the date/meal combo is NOT guaranteed to be unique). This is because the ADiSURC uploads corrections and changes to the menus as entirely new files. As such, it's suggested that if you need a specific day's menu you fetch the one with the highest id for the specified date.

dishes.csv

This table contains data about the individual dishes server.

Each row has the following three columns, in order:

• menu is the numeric id of the menu this dish is part of;
• serving is the specific serving represented. 0-2 for First, Second and Third serving, 3 for the contents of the takeaway basket;
• contents is the actual dish as described on the menu

Dockerfile

You may run this through Docker by mounting a volume to /adisurc (or passing your own DATADIR environment variable and mounting the volume there). The Dockerfile is extremely simple and based on the alpine image. It contains the ttf-liberation package and as such supports the CONVERT_PNG operation.

License Compliance

This is the official stance of the ADiSURC, in Italian, on using their website content:

I file presenti in questo sito per lo scaricamento (download) quali ad esempio la modulistica sono liberamente e gratuitamente disponibili. La riproduzione o l'impiego di informazioni testuali e multimediali (suoni, immagini, software ecc.) sono consentiti con indicazione della fonte e, qualora sia richiesta un'autorizzazione preliminare, questa indicherà esplicitamente ogni eventuale restrizione.

As such, if you use any file generated by this application, it is suggested that you specify the source as "Azienda per il Diritto allo Studio Universitario della Regione Campania via adisurcampania.it".