Spidy 0.2

Spidy - Web scraping simplified!

Overview

Spidy is an open source scripting language for Web scraping. Spidy allows building tools and applications which provide Web scraping features to wide audience of users.

Despite beign a scripting language, Spidy attempts to standardize Web scraping tasks around such fundamental tools like Web-get and XPath selectors. While URLs allow to reference arbitrary document on the Web, Spidy goes one step further to allow to referencing arbitrary piece of data with just a few lines of script, which is easy to create, distribute and understand.

Here are major features the package offers:

• Flexibility of scripting language

• XPath selectors to extract data

• Unified document model for HTML and JSON formats

• Templates for better output formatting

• Robust error handling and logging

Requirements

Spidy is written in Python and relies on Python Standard Library only.

• Python 2.7

• Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, BSD

Install

Installing from Python Package Index:

pip install spidy

For Windows installation instructions, please see documentation in docs directory.

‘Hello, World!’ in Spidy

Loading document or Web resource, for example trending repos page on GitHub:

get 'https://github.com/explore' as html

Selecting and returning trending repos links using XPath with class selector:

return &'//*[@class="repo-name css-truncate css-truncate-target"]'

And all together using Spidy API:

import spidy
print spidy.do('''
               get 'https://github.com/explore' as html
               return &'//*[@class="repo-name css-truncate css-truncate-target"]'
               ''')

will output list of relative links to stdout. Check out documentation for more examples.

Documentation

Documentation is available in the docs directory. Script examples are located in examples directory.

Feedback

Spidy is non-profit, meaning further development needs good reason to go on. We are happy to hear positive feedback, but also we can’t wait to learn what’s bad, so please send your thoughts and our bugs to [e-mail]. Thank you and have a good scraping!