Overview

The webscraping library aims to make web scraping easier.

All code is pure Python and has been run across multiple Linux servers, Windows machines, as well as Google App Engine.

Examples

common

>>> from webscraping import common
>>> common.remove_tags('hello <b>world</b>!')
'hello world!'

>>> common.extract_domain('http://www.google.com.au/tos.html')
'google.com.au'

>>> common.unescape('&lt;hello&nbsp;&amp;&nbsp;world&gt;')
'<hello & world>'

>>> common.extract_emails('hello richard AT sitescraper DOT net world')
['richard@sitescraper.net']

>>> cj = common.firefox_cookie()
>>> opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(cj))
>>> html = opener.open(url).read() # use current firefox cookies to access url

download

>>> from webscraping import download
>>> D = download.Download()

>>> # crawl given domain
>>> domain = ...
>>> for url in D.crawl(domain):
>>>    html = D.cache[url]

pdict

>>> from webscraping import pdict 
>>> cache = pdict.PersistentDict(CACHE_FILE)
>>> cache['a'] = range(5) # pickle stored in sqlite database
>>> 'a' in cache
True
>>> cache['a']
[0, 1, 2, 3, 4]

(see a further example here)

xpath

>>> from webscraping import xpath
>>> html = urllib2.urlopen(url).read()
>>> xpath.parse(html, '/html/body/ul[2]/li[@class="info"]/div[1]')
['div content']
>>> xpath.parse(html, '/html/body/ul[2]/li[@class="info"]/a/@href')
['url1', 'url2', 'url3']

License

This code is licensed under the LGPL license.