scrapelib 1.2.0

a library for scraping things

scrapelib is a library for making requests to less-than-reliable websites, it is implemented (as of 0.7) as a wrapper around requests.

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.

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

Written by James Turk <[e-mail]>, thanks to Michael Stephens for initial urllib2/httplib2 version

See https://github.com/jamesturk/scrapelib/graphs/contributors for contributors.

Requirements

• python 2.7, >=3.3

• requests >= 2.0 (earlier versions may work but aren’t tested)

Example Usage

Documentation: http://scrapelib.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

import scrapelib
s = scrapelib.Scraper(requests_per_minute=10)

# Grab Google front page
s.get('http://google.com')

# Will be throttled to 10 HTTP requests per minute
while True:
    s.get('http://example.com')