Skip to main content

Your friendly neighborhood web scraper

Project description

RoboBrowser: Your friendly neighborhood web scraper
===============================================

.. image:: https://badge.fury.io/py/robobrowser.png
:target: http://badge.fury.io/py/robobrowser

.. image:: https://travis-ci.org/jmcarp/robobrowser.png?branch=master
:target: https://travis-ci.org/jmcarp/robobrowser

.. image:: https://coveralls.io/repos/jmcarp/robobrowser/badge.png?branch=master
:target: https://coveralls.io/r/jmcarp/robobrowser

Homepage: `http://robobrowser.readthedocs.org/ <http://robobrowser.readthedocs.org/>`_

RoboBrowser is a simple, Pythonic library for browsing the web without a standalone web browser. RoboBrowser
can fetch a page, click on links and buttons, and fill out and submit forms. If you need to interact with web services
that don't have APIs, RoboBrowser can help.

.. code-block:: python

import re
from robobrowser import RoboBrowser

# Browse to Genius
browser = RoboBrowser(history=True)
browser.open('http://genius.com/')

# Search for Porcupine Tree
form = browser.get_form(action='/search')
form # <RoboForm q=>
form['q'].value = 'porcupine tree'
browser.submit_form(form)

# Look up the first song
songs = browser.select('.song_link')
browser.follow_link(songs[0])
lyrics = browser.select('.lyrics')
lyrics[0].text # \nHear the sound of music ...

# Back to results page
browser.back()

# Look up my favorite song
song_link = browser.get_link('trains')
browser.follow_link(song_link)

# Can also search HTML using regex patterns
lyrics = browser.find(class_=re.compile(r'\blyrics\b'))
lyrics.text # \nTrain set and match spied under the blind...

RoboBrowser combines the best of two excellent Python libraries:
`Requests <http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/>`_ and
`BeautifulSoup <http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/>`_.
RoboBrowser represents browser sessions using Requests and HTML responses
using BeautifulSoup, transparently exposing methods of both libraries:

.. code-block:: python

import re
from robobrowser import RoboBrowser

browser = RoboBrowser(user_agent='a python robot')
browser.open('https://github.com/')

# Inspect the browser session
browser.session.cookies['_gh_sess'] # BAh7Bzo...
browser.session.headers['User-Agent'] # a python robot

# Search the parsed HTML
browser.select('div.teaser-icon') # [<div class="teaser-icon">
# <span class="mega-octicon octicon-checklist"></span>
# </div>,
# ...
browser.find(class_=re.compile(r'column', re.I)) # <div class="one-third column">
# <div class="teaser-icon">
# <span class="mega-octicon octicon-checklist"></span>
# ...

You can also pass a custom `Session` instance for lower-level configuration:

.. code-block:: python

from requests import Session
from robobrowser import RoboBrowser

session = Session()
session.verify = False # Skip SSL verification
session.proxies = {'http': 'http://custom.proxy.com/'} # Set default proxies
browser = RoboBrowser(session=session)

RoboBrowser also includes tools for working with forms, inspired by
`WebTest <https://github.com/Pylons/webtest>`_ and `Mechanize <http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/mechanize/>`_.

.. code-block:: python

from robobrowser import RoboBrowser

browser = RoboBrowser()
browser.open('http://twitter.com')

# Get the signup form
signup_form = browser.get_form(class_='signup')
signup_form # <RoboForm user[name]=, user[email]=, ...

# Inspect its values
signup_form['authenticity_token'].value # 6d03597 ...

# Fill it out
signup_form['user[name]'].value = 'python-robot'
signup_form['user[user_password]'].value = 'secret'

# Submit the form
browser.submit_form(signup_form)

Checkboxes:

.. code-block:: python

from robobrowser import RoboBrowser

# Browse to a page with checkbox inputs
browser = RoboBrowser()
browser.open('http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_forms.asp')

# Find the form
form = browser.get_forms()[3]
form # <RoboForm vehicle=[]>
form['vehicle'] # <robobrowser.forms.fields.Checkbox...>

# Checked values can be get and set like lists
form['vehicle'].options # [u'Bike', u'Car']
form['vehicle'].value # []
form['vehicle'].value = ['Bike']
form['vehicle'].value = ['Bike', 'Car']

# Values can also be set using input labels
form['vehicle'].labels # [u'I have a bike', u'I have a car \r\n']
form['vehicle'].value = ['I have a bike']
form['vehicle'].value # [u'Bike']

# Only values that correspond to checkbox values or labels can be set;
# this will raise a `ValueError`
form['vehicle'].value = ['Hot Dogs']

Uploading files:

.. code-block:: python

from robobrowser import RoboBrowser

# Browse to a page with an upload form
browser = RoboBrowser()
browser.open('http://cgi-lib.berkeley.edu/ex/fup.html')

# Find the form
upload_form = browser.get_form()
upload_form # <RoboForm upfile=, note=>

# Choose a file to upload
upload_form['upfile'] # <robobrowser.forms.fields.FileInput...>
upload_form['upfile'].value = open('path/to/file.txt', 'r')

# Submit
browser.submit(upload_form)

By default, creating a browser instantiates a new requests `Session`.

Requirements
------------

- Python >= 2.6 or >= 3.3

License
-------

MIT licensed. See the bundled `LICENSE <https://github.com/jmcarp/robobrowser/blob/master/LICENSE>`_ file for more details.

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

robobrowser-0.5.3.tar.gz (22.0 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