scrapelib's Introduction

scrapelib

scrapelib is a library for making requests to websites, particularly those that may be less-than-reliable.

scrapelib originated as part of the Open States project to scrape the websites of all 50 state legislatures and as a result was therefore designed with features desirable when dealing with sites that have intermittent errors or require rate-limiting.

As of version 0.7 scrapelib has been retooled to take advantage of the superb requests library.

Advantages of using scrapelib over alternatives like httplib2 simply using requests as-is:

All of the power of the suberb requests library.
HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP requests via an identical API
support for simple caching with pluggable cache backends
request throttling
configurable retries for non-permanent site failures
optional robots.txt compliance

Written by James Turk <[email protected]>

Contributors:

Michael Stephens - initial urllib2/httplib2 version
Joe Germuska - fix for IPython embedding
Alex Chiang - fix to test suite

Requirements

python 2.7 or 3.3
requests >= 1.0

Installation

scrapelib is available on PyPI and can be installed via pip install scrapelib

PyPI package: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/scrapelib

Source: http://github.com/sunlightlabs/scrapelib

Documentation: http://scrapelib.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

Example Usage

import scrapelib
s = scrapelib.Scraper(requests_per_minute=10, 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')

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