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A webmining CLI tool & library for python.

Project description

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Minet

minet is a webmining command line tool & library for python (>= 3.6) that can be used to collect and extract data from a large variety of web sources such as raw webpages, Facebook, CrowdTangle, YouTube, Twitter, Media Cloud etc.

It adopts a very simple approach to various webmining problems by letting you perform a variety of actions from the comfort of the command line. No database needed: raw CSV files should be sufficient to do most of the work.

In addition, minet also exposes its high-level programmatic interface as a python library so you can tweak its behavior at will.

Shortcuts: Command line documentation, Python library documentation.

Summary

What it does

Minet can single-handedly:

  • Extract URLs from a text file (or a table)
  • Parse URLs (get useful information, with Facebook- and Youtube-specific stuff)
  • Join two CSV files by matching the columns containing URLs
  • From a list of URLs, resolve their redirections
    • ...and check their HTTP status
    • ...and download the HTML
    • ...and extract hyperlinks
    • ...and extract the text content and other metadata (title...)
    • ...and scrape structured data (using a declarative language to define your heuristics)
  • Crawl (using a declarative language to define a browsing behavior, and what to harvest)
  • Mine or search:
  • Scrape (without requiring special access):
  • Grab & dump cookies from your browser
  • Dump Hyphe data

Documented use cases

Features (from a technical standpoint)

  • Multithreaded, memory-efficient fetching from the web.
  • Multithreaded, scalable crawling using a comfy DSL.
  • Multiprocessed raw text content extraction from HTML pages.
  • Multiprocessed scraping from HTML pages using a comfy DSL.
  • URL-related heuristics utilities such as extraction, normalization and matching.
  • Data collection from various APIs such as CrowdTangle.

Installation

minet can be installed as a standalone CLI tool (currently only on mac, ubuntu & similar) by running the following command in your terminal:

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/medialab/minet/master/scripts/install.sh | bash

Don't trust us enough to pipe the result of a HTTP request into bash? We wouldn't either, so feel free to read the installation script here and run it on your end if you prefer.

On ubuntu & similar you might need to install curl and unzip before running the installation script if you don't already have it:

sudo apt-get install curl unzip

Else, minet can be installed directly as a python CLI tool and library using pip:

pip install minet

If you need more help to install and use minet from scratch, you can check those installation documents.

Finally if you want to install the standalone binaries by yourself (even for windows) you can find them in each release here.

Upgrading

To upgrade the standalone version, simply run the install script once again:

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/medialab/minet/master/scripts/install.sh | bash

To upgrade the python version you can use pip thusly:

pip install -U minet

Uninstallation

To uninstall the standalone version:

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/medialab/minet/master/scripts/uninstall.sh | bash

To uninstall the python version:

pip uninstall minet

Documentation

Contributing

To contribute to minet you can check out this documentation.

How to cite

minet is published on Zenodo as DOI

You can cite it thusly:

Guillaume Plique, Pauline Breteau, Jules Farjas, Héloïse Théro, & Jean Descamps. (2019, October 14). Minet, a webmining CLI tool & library for python. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4564399

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