crawler
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Author: Guido van Rossum Project: Web crawler Requirements: Python 3.4, or 3.3 + asyncio This is a web crawler. You give it a URL and it will crawl that website by following href links in the HTML pages. It doesn't do anything with the crawled pages, and the algorithm for finding links is intentionally naive -- those parts are easily modified, and not of particular interest (just use your favorite HTML parser instead of a regular expression). The point of the example is to show off how to write a reasonably complex HTTP client using the asyncio module. This module, originally nicknamed Tulip, is new in the Python 3.4 standard library, based on PEP 3156. The module is also available from PyPI for Python 3.3, but it doesn't work on older Python versions, since it uses the new 'yield from' syntax that was introduced in Python 3.3. (But don't despair; a backport named Trollius exists on PyPI that substitutes 'yield'.) In order to be fast and efficient, the program opens multiple parallel connections to the server and reuses connections for multiple requests. In order to handle most websites, it supports redirects, SSL (really TLS, but the Python support is in a module named 'ssl'), and the "chunked" transfer encoding. On my MacBook Air (2GHz Intel Core i7), with a fast network connection, it can visit all HTML pages of xkcd.com (over 1300 at the time of writing, and growing at a rate of three per week) in 7 seconds. It can also scan all public pages on dropbox.com (about 2500 URLs) in under 50 seconds. (The latter needs redirects, SSL and chunked.) Example command line (the -q reduces log output): python3.4 crawl.py -q xkcd.com Use --help to see all options. You can also use Python 3.3, after installing the asyncio package from PyPI. It should work on Windows too.