How to Remove Links to Twitter, Facebook, … Using a Proxy

Hi,

you can use the RegExReplaceInterceptor to remove links for example to Twitter and Facebook. It simply replaces parts of the response that matches a regular expression with a replacement string.

On the following site there are links and buttons to Twitter, Facebook and DZone located at the top right corner:

http://predic8.com/rest-webservices.htm

The Twitter and Facebook links use a tags while the DZone markup is generated by a script contained in a script tag. We will use the RegExReplaceInterceptor to remove those tags.

For each tag we want to remove we create a RegExReplaceInterceptor bean definition. You can do it with only one bean definition but than the pattern you use will be more complex. So we add the following bean definitions into our monitor-beans.xml document.

For Facebook:

<bean id="stripFacebook" class="com.predic8.membrane.core.interceptor.RegExReplaceInterceptor">
<property name="displayName" value="Strip Facebook"/>
<property name="pattern" value='&lt;a [^&gt;]*http://www.facebook\.com/sharer\.php.*?&lt;/a&gt;'/>
<property name="replacement" value=""/>
</bean>

For Twitter:

<bean id="stripTwitter" class="com.predic8.membrane.core.interceptor.RegExReplaceInterceptor">
<property name="displayName" value="Strip Twitter"/>
<property name="pattern" value='&lt;a [^&gt;]*http://twitter.com/share.*?&lt;/a&gt;'/>
<property name="replacement" value=""/>
</bean>

For DZone:

<bean id="stripDzone" class="com.predic8.membrane.core.interceptor.RegExReplaceInterceptor">
<property name="displayName" value="Strip DZone"/>
<property name="pattern" value="&lt;script [^&gt;]*http://widgets\.dzone\.com/links/widgets/zoneit\.js.*?&lt;/script&gt;"/>
<property name="replacement" value=""/>
</bean>

The pattern property defines the regular expression that is used. It follows standard Java RegEx Pattern syntax. Every part in the response that matches the regulare expression is replaced by the string defined by the replacement property.
We choose the patterns so that they match the a tag that points to facebook and twitter and the script tag that contains the script for DZone.

Now we need a rule configuration so that the RegExReplaceInterceptors are used. You can use the Membrane Monitor to create a rule and add the interceptors we created above to it or you can use the following rule.xml document:

<configuration>
  <rules>
    <forwarding-rule name="stripFacebookAndCo" port="2000">
      <targetport>80</targetport>
      <targethost>predic8.com</targethost>
      <interceptors>
        <interceptor id="stripDzone"/>
        <interceptor id="stripFacebook"/>
        <interceptor id="stripTwitter"/>
      </interceptors>
    </forwarding-rule>
  </rules>
</configuration>

Start the Router or Monitor with the rules.xml given above and the modifications to the monitor-beans.xml. Than open the following URL:

http://localhost:2000/rest-webservices.htm

You will see the same article as before but without the Twitter, Facebook and DZone links and buttons.