scrapelib 0.8.0

a library for scraping things

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

scrapelib is a project of Sunlight Labs (c) 2012. All code is released under a BSD-style license, see LICENSE for details.

Written by James Turk <[e-mail]>

Contributors:

• Michael Stephens - initial urllib2/httplib2 version

• Joe Germuska - fix for IPython embedding

• Alex Chiang - fix to test suite

Requirements

• python 2.6, 2.7, or 3.2

• requests

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, allow_cookies=True,
                      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')