trafilatura 0.4

Downloads web pages, scrapes main text and comments while preserving some structure, and converts to TXT, CSV, XML & TEI-XML

Description

Trafilatura can seamlessly download, parse and convert web documents: it scrapes the main body text while preserving part of the text formatting and page structure and converts to TXT, CSV, XML & TEI-XML.

Distinguishing between whole page and essential parts can help to alleviate many quality problems related to web texts as it can help with the noise consisting of recurring elements (headers and footers, ads, links/blogroll).

It has to be precise enough not to miss texts or discard valid documents, robust but also reasonably fast. It is designed to run in production on millions of documents.

Features

• Seamless download and extraction: URLs, HTML files or parsed HTML trees as input

• Focus on main text and/or comments

• Structural elements preserved: paragraphs, titles, lists, quotes, code, line breaks, in-line text formatting (experimental)

• Extraction of metadata (currently title and date, more to come)

• Output in plain text (minimal formatting), CSV (with metadata, tab-separated values) or XML format (for metadata and structure)

• Computationally efficient (relies on lxml)

• Robust extraction and generic readability and jusText algorithms used as fallback

• Optional language detection on the extracted content

Evaluation and alternatives

For experimental results see the evaluation page and evaluation script. To reproduce the tests just clone the repository, install all necessary packages and run the evaluation script with the data provided in the tests directory.

300 documents, 869 text and 878 boilerplate segments (2020-03-19)
Python Package	Precision	Recall	Accuracy	F-Score	Time
raw HTML	0.519	0.885	0.535	0.654	0
baseline (text markup)	0.726	0.776	0.742	0.750	1.14
html2text 2020.1.16	0.499	0.787	0.501	0.611	11.00
inscriptis 1.0 (html to txt)	0.521	0.962	0.541	0.676	2.47
justext 2.2.0 (German stoplist)	0.849	0.529	0.719	0.652	6.37
newspaper3k 0.2.8	0.923	0.591	0.772	0.721	14.80
goose3 3.1.6	0.957	0.640	0.807	0.767	21.54
boilerpy3 1.0.2 (article mode)	0.841	0.734	0.799	0.784	5.65
dragnet 2.0.4	0.909	0.722	0.825	0.804	3.64
readability-lxml 0.7.1	0.928	0.743	0.844	0.826	6.59
news-please 1.4.25	0.926	0.747	0.844	0.827	70.81
trafilatura 0.3.1 (rule-based)	0.901	0.831	0.871	0.865	5.43
trafilatura 0.3.1 (+ justext)	0.897	0.868	0.884	0.882	6.97
trafilatura 0.4	0.914	0.869	0.894	0.891	4.87
trafilatura 0.4 (+ fallback)	0.925	0.904	0.916	0.914	9.94

Installation

Chiefly with the Python package manager pip: pip install --upgrade trafilatura.

For more details see installation documentation.

Usage

With Python or on the command-line.

In a nutshell, with Python:

>>> import trafilatura
>>> downloaded = trafilatura.fetch_url('https://github.blog/2019-03-29-leader-spotlight-erin-spiceland/')
>>> trafilatura.extract(downloaded)
# outputs main content and comments as plain text ...

On the command-line:

$ trafilatura -u "https://github.blog/2019-03-29-leader-spotlight-erin-spiceland/"
# outputs main content and comments as plain text ...

For more information please refer to the usage documentation.

License

trafilatura is distributed under the GNU General Public License v3.0

GPL and free software licensing: What’s in it for business?

Going further

Online documentation: trafilatura.readthedocs.io

Trafilatura: Italian word for wire drawing.

• In order to gather web documents it can be useful to download the portions of a website programmatically, here is how to use sitemaps to crawl websites

• Content von Webseiten laden mit Trafilatura (Tutorial video in German by Simon Meier-Vieracker)

• Download von Web-Daten & Daten aufbereiten und verwalten (Tutorials in German by Noah Bubenhofer)

Roadmap

• [-] Duplicate detection at sentence, paragraph and document level using a least recently used (LRU) cache

• [-] XML output compatible with the recommendations of the Text Encoding Initiative

• [X] Metadata integration

• [-] Language detection on the extracted content

• [-] Preservation of in-line text formatting (bold, italic, etc.)

• [ ] Configuration and extraction parameters

Contributing

Contributions are welcome!

Feel free to file bug reports on the issues page.

Thanks to these contributors who submitted features and bugfixes:

• DerKozmonaut

• LukasBBAW

• vbarbaresi

Author

This effort is part of methods to derive information from web documents in order to build text databases for research (chiefly linguistic analysis and natural language processing). A significant challenge resides in the ability to extract and pre-process web texts to meet scientific expectations: Web corpus construction involves numerous design decisions, and this software packages can help facilitate collection and enhance corpus quality.

• Barbaresi, A. “Generic Web Content Extraction with Open-Source Software”, Proceedings of KONVENS 2019, Kaleidoscope Abstracts, 2019.

• Barbaresi, A. “Efficient construction of metadata-enhanced web corpora”, Proceedings of the 10th Web as Corpus Workshop (WAC-X), 2016.

You can contact me via my contact page or GitHub.