Anyone know of a good Python based web crawler that I could use?

Matt_50522 0
Viewed 97376

I'm half-tempted to write my own, but I don't really have enough time right now. I've seen the Wikipedia list of open source crawlers but I'd prefer something written in Python. I realize that I could probably just use one of the tools on the Wikipedia page and wrap it in Python. I might end up doing that - if anyone has any advice about any of those tools, I'm open to hearing about them. I've used Heritrix via its web interface and I found it to be quite cumbersome. I definitely won't be using a browser API for my upcoming project.

Thanks in advance. Also, this is my first SO question!

web-crawler python
8 Answers
  • Mechanize is my favorite; great high-level browsing capabilities (super-simple form filling and submission).
  • Twill is a simple scripting language built on top of Mechanize
  • BeautifulSoup + urllib2 also works quite nicely.
  • Scrapy looks like an extremely promising project; it's new.
user_381460

Use Scrapy.

It is a twisted-based web crawler framework. Still under heavy development but it works already. Has many goodies:

  • Built-in support for parsing HTML, XML, CSV, and Javascript
  • A media pipeline for scraping items with images (or any other media) and download the image files as well
  • Support for extending Scrapy by plugging your own functionality using middlewares, extensions, and pipelines
  • Wide range of built-in middlewares and extensions for handling of compression, cache, cookies, authentication, user-agent spoofing, robots.txt handling, statistics, crawl depth restriction, etc
  • Interactive scraping shell console, very useful for developing and debugging
  • Web management console for monitoring and controlling your bot
  • Telnet console for low-level access to the Scrapy process

Example code to extract information about all torrent files added today in the mininova torrent site, by using a XPath selector on the HTML returned:

class Torrent(ScrapedItem):
    pass

class MininovaSpider(CrawlSpider):
    domain_name = 'mininova.org'
    start_urls = ['http://www.mininova.org/today']
    rules = [Rule(RegexLinkExtractor(allow=['/tor/\d+']), 'parse_torrent')]

    def parse_torrent(self, response):
        x = HtmlXPathSelector(response)
        torrent = Torrent()

        torrent.url = response.url
        torrent.name = x.x("//h1/text()").extract()
        torrent.description = x.x("//div[@id='description']").extract()
        torrent.size = x.x("//div[@id='info-left']/p[2]/text()[2]").extract()
        return [torrent]
user_171600

Check the HarvestMan, a multi-threaded web-crawler written in Python, also give a look to the spider.py module.

And here you can find code samples to build a simple web-crawler.

CMS_54450

I've used Ruya and found it pretty good.

kshahar_339820

Another simple spider Uses BeautifulSoup and urllib2. Nothing too sophisticated, just reads all a href's builds a list and goes though it.

user_2320180
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