Skip to main content

A scraping library made to be simple and asynchronous

Project description

What is fodio?

Fodio is a web scraping tool, used to easily traverse websites and collects data on. Some key concepts fodio was built on was simplicity and asynchronous-ity (No, I don’t think that’s a real word). Inspired by the Demiurge library, which is not active anymore, Fodio is here to save the day!

Why would I not use Scrapy?

Good Question! There are some key differences that are important too note.

  1. Scrapy uses C extensions, which depending on the environment, can be a pain!

  2. Scrapy is not asynchronous!

  3. IMO, This is simpler.

Also, if you’re on linux, you can use uvloop, which should help speed things up!

Installation

To install with pypi, use simply pip install fodio

To install manually, either download and unpack, or clone this repository. Then, while in the root of the local repository, do python setup.py install

I’m not great at this documentaion thing, so let’s just get right into the quick-start.

Quick-Start

Too start scraping, inspect element will be your friend. You’re going to be copying the CSS selectors in the elements you wish to harvest. In this case, we’ll be walking though a github example that you can also find in the demo file, on the Fodio github page.

First, we need to make an item. Then “item” will represent a section of the page.

It’s good too note, that this example won’t have Items as ItemAttrs, but you can do that. I really suggest looking at the demos file, because that includes a bunch of great examples on what to do.

class GithubPage(Item):
    ...
    class Meta:
        ...

Notice the “Meta” class. This is used too hold your selector and root_url information. In this senerio, we want to get a github user’s real name + description. First, let’s narrow in on the profile card with the “.h-card” selector. Then, we’ll supply the root_url “https://github.com

class GithubPage(Item):
    ...
    class Meta:
        selector = ".h-card"
        root_url = "https://github.com"

Not that bad eh? Now that we have the profile card, we need to set some ItemAttributes to extract the information. We’ll use a TextAttr object to extract the text from a node with the real name, and anther TextAttr for the description.

class GithubPage(Item):
    name = TextAttr(".p-name")
    desc = TextAttr(".p-note > div:nth-child(1)", raise_not_found=False)

    class Meta:
        selector = ".h-card"
        root_url = "https://github.com"

Now time too run it! we’ll create an asynchronous function called runner to do this. GithubPage has a classmethod called search which will add a path too the root_url, and fetch it. So let’s do that.

accounts = ['Zwork101', 'bukson', 'torvalds', 'User1m', 'random-robbie']
async def runner():
    result = await GithubPage.search(account)
    print("{account_name}'s real name is {real_name}".format(
        account_name=account, real_name=result['name'] if result['name'] else "not known"))
    print('{description}\n'.format(
        description=('"' + result['desc'] + '"') if result['desc'] else "No Description"))

And we’re done! After adding asyncio too run it, this is our final product:

import asyncio

from fodio import Item, TextAttr


class GithubPage(Item):
        name = TextAttr(".p-name")
        desc = TextAttr(".p-note > div:nth-child(1)", raise_not_found=False)

        class Meta:
            selector = ".h-card"
            root_url = "https://github.com"

accounts = ['Zwork101', 'bukson', 'torvalds', 'User1m', 'random-robbie']

async def runner():
    result = await GithubPage.search(account)
    print("{account_name}'s real name is {real_name}".format(
        account_name=account, real_name=result['name'] if result['name'] else "not known"))
    print('{description}\n'.format(
        description=('"' + result['desc'] + '"') if result['desc'] else "No Description"))

loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
loop.run_until_complete(runner())

That wasn’t that bad now was it? For more examples, see the demo folder. Otherwise, get scraping!

Wait, but why is it called “Fodio”

Well, apparently developers like to name their projects in latin, or some other language no one uses. Fodio (atleast this is what some sites said) can mean “delve” which is an english word for all you non-english majors / non-Magic: The Gathering players. Delve means to research and dig, 2 things this library does!

Project details


Download files

Download the file for your platform. If you're not sure which to choose, learn more about installing packages.

Source Distribution

fodio-1.0.1.tar.gz (7.0 kB view hashes)

Uploaded Source

Supported by

AWS AWS Cloud computing and Security Sponsor Datadog Datadog Monitoring Fastly Fastly CDN Google Google Download Analytics Microsoft Microsoft PSF Sponsor Pingdom Pingdom Monitoring Sentry Sentry Error logging StatusPage StatusPage Status page