PAPA-NICOLAU

a command-line web scraping tool

Papa-Nicolau is a rule-based web crawler and information extraction tool capable of manipulating and merging new and existing documents. XML Path Language (XPath) and regular expressions are used to define rules for filtering content and web traversal. Output may be converted into text, csv, pdf, and/or HTML formats.

Installation

pip install scrape

or

pip install git+https://github.com/huntrar/scrape.git#egg=scrape

or

git clone https://github.com/huntrar/scrape
cd scrape
python setup.py install

You must install wkhtmltopdf to save files to pdf.

Usage

usage: scrape.py [-h] [-a [ATTRIBUTES [ATTRIBUTES ...]]] [-all]
                 [-c [CRAWL [CRAWL ...]]] [-C] [--csv] [-cs [CACHE_SIZE]]
                 [-f [FILTER [FILTER ...]]] [--html] [-i] [-m]
                 [-max MAX_CRAWLS] [-n] [-ni] [-no] [-o [OUT [OUT ...]]] [-ow]
                 [-p] [-pt] [-q] [-s] [-t] [-v] [-x [XPATH]]
                 [QUERY [QUERY ...]]

a command-line web scraping tool

positional arguments:
  QUERY                 URLs/files to scrape

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -a [ATTRIBUTES [ATTRIBUTES ...]], --attributes [ATTRIBUTES [ATTRIBUTES ...]]
                        extract text using tag attributes
  -all, --crawl-all     crawl all pages
  -c [CRAWL [CRAWL ...]], --crawl [CRAWL [CRAWL ...]]
                        regexp rules for following new pages
  -C, --clear-cache     clear requests cache
  --csv                 write files as csv
  -cs [CACHE_SIZE], --cache-size [CACHE_SIZE]
                        size of page cache (default: 1000)
  -f [FILTER [FILTER ...]], --filter [FILTER [FILTER ...]]
                        regexp rules for filtering text
  --html                write files as HTML
  -i, --images          save page images
  -m, --multiple        save to multiple files
  -max MAX_CRAWLS, --max-crawls MAX_CRAWLS
                        max number of pages to crawl
  -n, --nonstrict       allow crawler to visit any domain
  -ni, --no-images      do not save page images
  -no, --no-overwrite   do not overwrite files if they exist
  -o [OUT [OUT ...]], --out [OUT [OUT ...]]
                        specify outfile names
  -ow, --overwrite      overwrite a file if it exists
  -p, --pdf             write files as pdf
  -pt, --print          print text output
  -q, --quiet           suppress program output
  -s, --single          save to a single file
  -t, --text            write files as text
  -v, --version         display current version
  -x [XPATH], --xpath [XPATH]
                        filter HTML using XPath

Author

• Hunter Hammond ([email protected])

Notes

• Input to scrape can be links, files, or a combination of the two, allowing you to create new files constructed from both existing and newly scraped content.
• Multiple input files/URLs are saved to multiple output files/directories by default. To consolidate them, use the --single flag.
• Images are automatically included when saving as pdf or HTML; this involves making additional HTTP requests, adding a significant amount of processing time. If you wish to forgo this feature use the --no-images flag, or set the environment variable SCRAPE_DISABLE_IMGS.
• Requests cache is enabled by default to cache webpages, it can be disabled by setting the environment variable SCRAPE_DISABLE_CACHE.
• Pages are saved temporarily as PART.html files during processing. Unless saving pages as HTML, these files are removed automatically upon conversion or exit.
• To crawl pages with no restrictions use the --crawl-all flag, or filter which pages to crawl by URL keywords by passing one or more regexps to --crawl.
• If you want the crawler to follow links outside of the given URLs domain, use --nonstrict.
• Crawling can be stopped by Ctrl-C or alternatively by setting the number of pages or links to be crawled using --maxpages and --maxlinks. A page may contain zero or many links to more pages.
• The text output of scraped files can be printed to stdout rather than saved by entering --print.
• Filtering HTML can be done using --xpath, while filtering text is done by entering one or more regexps to --filter.
• If you only want to specify specific tag attributes to extract rather than an entire XPath, use --attributes. The default choice is to extract only text attributes, but you can specify one or many different attributes (such as href, src, title, or any attribute available..).