Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it.
Closed 8 years ago.
Improve this question
I've started writing a crawler to crawl vbulletin boards. However, I am not a web programmer (json api's I can do, but that isn't really web-crawling), and as such I do not know what the best way to crawl is, and what tools are available.
I am more than capable of writing the crawler, but the I find the underlying HTML very irregular, and so I don't want to be a victim of the structure of the HTML changing in a newer version of vbulletin.
I'm writing an interface using pycurl and beautiful soup. However, is there a better way to do this, are there any good crawlers already available for vbulletin ? (language is not a concern). A meta forum crawler (works with more than one forum type) would be even better.
If you cannot suggest one, could you advise me, if you have the experience, from what I should expect from the stability of the underlying HTML, should I worry about a new version of vbulletin breaking my crawler ?
Perhaps there is a better way to extract a vbulletin dataset ?
Having HTML change is an inherit issue with webcrawling. That is why it should only be an absolute last resort. Maintaining crawlers can be a huge task, as you have seen, because HTML can change daily and there are no guarentees.
Because the data that is usually being searched for is uniform, scrapy is an excellent choice.
http://doc.scrapy.org/en/0.14/index.html
It uses xpath to select elements, which is relatively easy to mainatin imo.
Even if there is a vbulletin specific scraper it is still dependent on HTML which can break at will. Because vbulletin is a platform you are probably pretty well off scraping it. I would think HTML would only change on version updates which shouldn't be that often.
Does the mobile API provide you with any functionality you need?
https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/content.php/367-API-Overview, I guess this depends on per site vbulletin setup.
Related
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it.
Closed 8 years ago.
Improve this question
I am confused as to how APIs work with django in general. I am looking to get started but am a bit confused where to start. I am fairly new to django but have mastered most of the basics.
I am looking to understand how to communicate with other REST apis, how to send and receive json data, what is needed for this data(where does it live, are models required?, do I create views to access json data?)
I am looking for a comprehensive tutorial or book/article that I can follow that will teach me the ins and outs of this. Any help on where to get started would be much appreciated.
Django is for web development. If what you want to do is get JSON from some remote RESTful service, no part of that requires Django. Instead, try urllib or httplib2, and check simple examples elsewhere.
Again, sending JSON data is a simple as using the json library in python, and using the same urllib tricks you use to consume JSON from other people. So no django needed there either.
As for whether models are required, well that depends 100% on what you're trying to do. Your question about needing "views" on json data I think confuses several different issues.
I'd recommend you read up on RESTful services in general, and where JSON fits before you start implementation.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it.
Closed 8 years ago.
Improve this question
I would like to design an algorithm using python that scrapes thousands of pages like this one and this one, gathers all the data and inserts it into a MySQL database. The script will be run on a weekly or bi-weekly basis to update the database of any new information added to each individual page.
Ideally I would like a scraper that is easy to work with for table structured data but also data that does not have unique identifiers (ie. id and classes attributes).
Which scraper add-on should I use? BeautifulSoup, Scrapy or Mechanize?
Are there any particular tutorials/books I should be looking at for this desired result?
In the long-run I will be implementing a mobile app that works with all this data through querying the database.
first thought:
(in order to save some time) Have you seen thewaybackmachine? http://archive.org/web/
2nd thought:
If you are going to develop a mobile app then the layout of this site doesn't lend itself to be put on handheld devices easily. I would suggest not bothering with the webpage portion of this. You are just going to have to dig all the information out eventually and change your scrappers each time they change some little thing on their website.
You can get the data from their developer API in Json or CSV format.
From the raw data you can make it into whatever format you want. (for personal use only according to their site)
Caveats:
Pay attention to the robots.txt file on the site.
http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html
If they don't want to be scrapped they will tell you so. You can do this for personal use, but if you try making money from their content you will find yourself sued.
You could use lxml, which can take XPath specifiers. It takes a while to get used to the XPath syntax, but it's useful in cases like this.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it.
Closed 9 years ago.
Improve this question
I'm looking to get into web development. My goal is to create some interactive webpages that interact with MS SQL databases (read/insert/updates), and also possibly sites that interact with XML files.
I've got some basic understanding of Python and Perl scripting. Can someone point me in the right direction in either of those languages to accomplish what i'm looking to do, or if it's easier to accomplish in another language what would that be?
Apologies if my stated goal is too broad.
I'd strongly suggest you to look into some of the web development frameworks. They take care of many low-level tasks which is needed in order to build a solid web page. I'm not very familiar with perl, so I can only suggest Python frameworks, especially one of the my favourites - Django. It has very good documentation which is essential for the first-timer. I believe you should be fine as long as you follow the official documentation.
Good luck
You can use SQL Alchamy in python, and lxml or the default ElementTree xml module for simple cases.
I have done both for a webservice I maintain, and they work nice.
You can also use a web development framework. I personally suggest Flask based on that it is a lightweight framework as opposted to django for instance. However, depending on your exact use case the latter might be better.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it.
Closed 9 years ago.
Improve this question
I have a very I/O intensive task (it crawls webpages). I want to make this task available via a web API and built some JavaScript+HTML interface on top of it. And I want to do it in Python, since I already have a set of Python scripts implementing this task.
Now I'm looking for a Python web framework to do this. What web framework can you recommend for a very I/O intensive web page?
Some more details:
I already worked with Flask and I liked it
I don't need user management, but I need sessions
I want to build the actual UI with Angular/Ember
Since it's about web crawling, I'd go with Scrapy as a crawling tool and twisted event-driven networking engine/web-framework. Scrapy is actually built on top of twisted, so this set might be a good choice for you.
Also, take a look at tornado web framework that is using non-blocking I/O.
Hope that helps.
Django is the most popular web framework for Python.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it.
Closed 8 years ago.
Improve this question
A website may be accessed not only by a user on a browser, but also programs, bots and crawlers. I have a website running on Google App Engine with python which has non-static HTML pages that are generated by a python program by combining, merging and looping strings. However, they are also not dynamic pages in the sense that no user input is required to generate these pages. The content generation by python is solely for convenience, brevity and ease of maintenance, and is set completely by the url.
Some search engines cannot index dynamic pages. I would like to know if these pages qualify as 'dynamic', i.e. whether they can be crawled or indexed for the usual metadata and content by such bots, and in general would like a way to check how any url appears to a bot or crawler like the ones used by search engines, so that I can see when a certain url is uncrawlable.
If anyone knows of any resources or techniques available, it'd be really helpful.
Some search engines cannot index dynamic pages.
Not true. Clients cannot know and do not care if the server got the content by executing a script or just reading a static file.
Most search engines won't execute client side JavaScript. Most search engines will not submit forms.
If your content is accessible by following links (that are in the HTML), then search engines can get the pages.
Lynx is a text-based browser that gives you a pretty good idea of how a searchbot would see your page. Ancient, tried and true.