freestuffs 0.1.6

Find free stuff near you!

Free Stuffs!

This is a Python 3.x package which scrapes free stuff from Craigslist. freestuffs is under the MIT license. Check out the source code and the docs.

• Using StuffScraper one can gather a list of free stuffs.

• Using StuffCharter, one can create an HTML map of the free stuffs.

This package can be used to create a web application, such as the Treasure-map (source), or for use on Twitter.

Installation

freestuffs can be installed with pip:

pip install freestuffs

The package has the following dependencies which are automatically installed by pip:

• beautifulsoup4

• bs4

• folium

• geopy

• requests

• Unidecode

Additionally, these may be manually installed using pip with pip install -r requirements.txt.

Getting Started

Stuffs

The stuff class corresponds to a Craiglist free stuff posting. It’s basic characteristics include title and location. Notably, there is no price attribute. If the posting has no image, the Wikipedia no-image image is used in it’s place.

>>> from freestuffs.stuff_scraper import StuffScraper
>>> stuffs = StuffScraper('montreal', 5).stuffs
>>> print(stuffs[0])
what: free shelves
 where: Workman St, montreal
 link: http://montreal.craigslist.ca/zip/5629811181.html
 image: https://images.craigslist.org/00r0r_4p06sM5Hn4O_300x300.jpg

Scape Stuffs

The StuffScraper class will scrape Craiglist for free stuff.

>>> from freestuffs.stuff_scraper import StuffScraper
>>> stuffs = StuffScraper('montreal', 5).stuffs # precise=False
>>> print(stuffs[0].thing)  # Title
Meubles / furniture

In order for the scraper to automatically scrape for latitude and longitude coordinates, pass in the parameter precise=True into the constructor.

>>> from freestuffs.stuff_scraper import StuffScraper
>>> stuffs = StuffScraper('montreal', 5, precise=True).stuffs
>>> print(stuffs[0].coordinates)
['45.617854', '-73.633931']

Chart Stuffs

The StuffCharter class will produce a folium Map object populated with free stuff from the StuffScraper.

>>> from freestuffs.stuff_scraper import StuffScraper
>>> from freestuffs.stuff_charter import StuffCharter
>>> stuffs = StuffScraper('montreal', 5, precise=True).stuffs
>>> stuffs_chart = StuffCharter(stuffs)
call save_map(path) generate html map
>>> type(map.treasure_map)
<class 'folium.folium.Map'>

The StuffCharter object is a wrapper around the folium.Map. Call save_map(HTML_PATH, CSS_PATH)

>>> stuffs_chart.save_map('webmap', 'static/style.css')

This function creates a directory if it is not found in the path. Call instead save_test_map() to generate an HTML map in the current directory.

Legend

• The smaller the posting, the older it is.

• The darker the border, the higher the amount of overlap.

Triage

The triage checks for regex search in this order:

1. Red are furniture - wood, shelf, shelves, table, chair, scrap, desk.

2. Blue are electronics: tv, sony, ecran, speakers, wire, electronic, saw, headphones, arduino.

3. Black are the “desired” stuffs: book, games, cool, guide, box.

4. White is default (no regex search matches).

Support

The easiest way to get support is to open an issue on Github.