Example on Graphing Awstats with Ruby and Gruff

30 December, 2006

I spent a moment today testing the Gruff Graphing Library for Ruby to process Awstats data. With the library to handle the graph generated and powerful language, most of the lines of code went to parsing the dataset.

Awstats is a great web statistics software with useful data, and it is even better with graphs like this:

By the way, visits by Firefox has exceeded Internet Explorer this month! It’s the first time at lifehack.org.

Example of the awstats dataset
Because the whole file (i.e. awstats122006.www.lifehack.org.txt) is huge, I have stripped the browser section into a separate file. Here is an example of its format.

Source Code
The code is a linear script and I has not tried to polish it, but it serves to show its functionality. The code does the following things:

Use hash to store browsers hits
Open file and process line by line
Use case statements to group browsers hits
Create an object of Gruff and pass the hash to g.data()

#!/usr/bin/ruby

require 'rubygems'
require 'gruff'

# declaration
section = false
browser = {
  :firefox => 0,
  :mozilla => 0,
  :msie => 0,
  :opera => 0,
  :safari => 0,
  :other => 0
}

File.open('browser-data.txt') do |file|
  file.each_line do |s|
    # think how to simply this
    if s.include? "BEGIN_BROWSER": section = true
    elsif section == false: next
    elsif s.include? "END_BROWSER": break
    end

#start processing
    case s
    when /firefox[\d\.]*\s(\d+)/
      browser[:firefox] += $1.to_i
    when /msie[\d\.]*\s(\d+)/
      browser[:msie] += $1.to_i
    when /safari[\d\.]*\s(\d+)/
      browser[:safari] += $1.to_i
    when /opera[\d\.]*\s(\d+)/
      browser[:opera] += $1.to_i
    when /mozilla|netscape[\d\.]*\s(\d+)/
      browser[:mozilla] += $1.to_i
    when /[\w\d\.]*\s(\d+)/
      browser[:other] += $1.to_i
    end
  end
end

#browser.each {|key, value| puts key.to_s + ": " + value.to_s}

# start graphing
g = Gruff::Pie.new
g.title = "Lifehack.org Visits by Browsers - Dec-2006"
g.font = "/usr/share/fonts/dejavu-lgc/DejaVuLGCSans.ttf"

browser.each {|key, value| g.data(key.to_s, value)}

g.write('lifehack_2006_dec_browser_graph.png')

Example on Graphing Awstats with Ruby and Gruff

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