scrapelib

A Python library for scraping things.

Features include:

• HTTP, HTTPS, FTP requests via an identical API
• HTTP caching, compression and cookies
• redirect following
• request throttling
• robots.txt compliance (optional)
• robust error handling

scrapelib is a project of Sunlight Labs (c) 2010. All code is released under a BSD-style license, see LICENSE for details.

Written by Michael Stephens <mstephens@sunlightfoundation.com> and James Turk <jturk@sunlightfoundation.com>.

Source is available at http://github.com/sunlightlabs/scrapelib.

Requirements

python >= 2.6

httplib2 optional but highly recommended.

Installation

scrapelib is available on PyPI and thus can be downloaded installed via pip install scrapelib or easy_install scrapelib.

To install from a source distribution run python setup.py install.

Example Usage

import scrapelib
s = scrapelib.Scraper(requests_per_minute=10, allow_cookies=True,
                      follow_robots=True)

# Grab Google front page
s.urlopen('http://google.com')

# Will raise RobotExclusionError
s.urlopen('http://google.com/search')

# Will be throttled to 10 HTTP requests per minute
while True:
    s.urlopen('http://example.com')