I did some googling and didn't find anything complete for my problem, but it is so generic, there has to be something.
I need feed parsing tool for my Django app (i want to fetch atom feed from somewhere and store its contents). I just found some feedparser.py references but the actual site is a long gone.
Could you provide some pointers?
feedparser is still pretty much the canonical solution for this in Python. It's very far from gone: see the documentation here and the actual project page here
Related
I'm learning a practice called 'web scraping' using python. From what I can tell so far the idea is to send out a request to load the site data from a server, store the DOM html in a variable, and then basically data mine the s*** out of the resulting string until you are able to quickly access exactly and only the information you need.
Well I'm ready to start fiddling with statements that might help me do the actual data mining, but first I need to see and understand all of the html in my string. After I've got the hang of it I won't care what the html looks like, but right now I need to be able to reference it to properly analyze my output. so far I've tried google, python.net, youtube, various blogs and etc. But they all look like alianeese.
I'm just looking for the typical stuff you know?
<html><head><meta><script src=""><style src=""><title></title></head><body><div class=""><img src=""></div><div><h1>my page</h1><li></li><li></li><li></li><li></li><li></li><li></li><p>click here</p></div></body></html>
You get what I'm saying? Just a website... that uses like... html... to render some simple structured data.
P.S. This is kind of neat. I went to give this post some tags and I discovered 'simple-html-dom'. So I googled it. Apparently it's some kind of language that lets you parse html from online sources in exactly the way I am trying to. I may check that out later, but I still want to figure out how to do this with python.
EDIT Actually something like this would work fine but it's just so big. I would prefer something smaller to work with.
While it would probably be nice to build your own web pages to use, you can also try looking for pages "optimized for lynx". Lynx is a text-only browser with which "simple" pages naturally work best.
Most of the links you'll find will be dead already, but I found this list for instance, which still has many alive and equally simple pages: http://www.put.com/dead.html (please ignore the content itself... there is no particular reason I chose this example other than that it probably works nicely for your purposes!)
I am working on a website for which it would be useful to know the number of links shared by a particular facebook page (e.g., http://www.facebook.com/cocacola) so that the user can know whether they are 'liking' a firehose of information or a dribble of goodness. What is the best way to get the number of links/status updates that are shared by a particular page?
+1 for implementations that use python (this is a django website) but any solutions are welcome! I tried using fbconsole to accomplish this but I have come up a little short.
For what it is worth, this unanswered question seems relevant. As does the fact that, as of 2012.04.18, you can export your data to csv from the insights management page on the facebook site. The information is in there I just don't know how to get it out...
Thanks for your help!
In the event that anyone else finds this useful, I thought I'd post my gist example here. fbconsole makes it fairly simple to extract data through the Facebook Graph API.
The caveat is that it was not terribly easy to programmatically extract data through fbconsole so I wrote the fbconsole.automatically_authenticate to make it much easier to access this information in a systematic way. This addition has not yet been incorporated into the master branch of fbconsole (it was just posted this morning), but it is available here in the meantime for those that are interested.
I want to make a Python script available as a service on the net. The script, which is my first 'proper' Python program, takes a txt file as argument and writes an image into the work directory. So:
How difficult is it for somebody who is new to Python and web development?
How much work is it?
Do I need a framework (Django, cherryPy, web2py)?
Are there good tutorials?
How do I avoid the server to be compromised?
What are my next steps?
==> What is the easiest way?
In the end it is enough, if it is a white page, with some text, and a button, which when clicked, opens a file dialog. After the txt is processed, the server should just return the image, which was written on the hard drive. Already I have access to a server which has Ubuntu installed through a friend.
[update]
Thanks for all your answers. After reading them I want to stress again, that I want to have it as minimal as possible. Srikar's suggestion sounds like the easiest one:
Put it in executable directory of your OS (commonly known as CGI
path). Provide a simple HTML form & upon form submission hit this
script which executes & returns back the image you want to display.
Any objections or comments? Do you know any tutorials for that?
[udpate2]
I found this SO answer: File Sharing Site in Python Is this a sensible approach?
It's not too difficult. Actually, it sounds like a good first project.
That too subjective to answer. An hour to days.
No, you don't need one, but I'd use one if I were you. They abstract away some of the stuff you really don't care about, and you'll learn a tool you can use again in the future.
Plenty. If you want a real rundown of how Python works for the web, read the HOWTO from Python.org. If you just want to learn how to do this one project, pick a framework and do their tutorial.
This question is so broad and complex that I'm not going to try to answer it. Search this site, or Google, for questions like that.
Your next step should be to pick a framework; I've used Django successfully. Just download it, follow the installation instructions, and work your way through their tutorial; it should tell you everything you need to know to do what you want. If you still have questions once you've learned how to do the basics, come back and ask again!
Edit: The answer to that other question will certainly work for you. There, they just receive a GET request and respond with data from a Python file. You need to receive a GET request, respond with an HTML page (easy enough), then respond to a POST request that includes an uploaded file (slightly more complicated) and run your python routine on the uploaded file and then respond with the created image (or a link to it).
Take a look at this page which includes a simple Python script to do file uploads. You should easily be able to modify it to do what you want.
How difficult is it for somebody who is new to Python and web development?
Depends on your level of knowledge.
How much work is it?
Depends on which method you choose to solve the problem.
Do I need a framework (Django, cherryPy, web2py)?
Not necessarily - you could get started by using the CGI (http://docs.python.org/library/cgi.html)
Are there good tutorials?
Yes, there are plenty. The Python docs are an excellent place to start.
How do I avoid the server to be compromised?
Again, depends on the method you choose to solve the problem, although there are commonalities.
What are my next steps?
Dare I say it again, choose a method, read the docs, have a play!
If its just as simple as you have described it. Then you might not even need Django. You could simply use CGI scripting. All of these design decisions, depend on whether
You need (or foresee) a SQL storage?
or a Content-Management-System?
Will you need multiple-user support?
Do you need tight security?
Do you need different privileges for different users?
Do you need an Admin to manage your site?
If the answer to above questions is atleast 60% correct, then you might consider Django. otherwise, just write a python script. Put it in executable directory of your OS (commonly known as CGI path). Provide a simple HTML form & upon form submission hit this script which executes & returns back the image you want to display. So, it all depends on the features you need...
In the end, I created what I needed with Flask.
They have a well documented pattern / tutorial on Uploading Files. The tutorial is understandable even for people with little python and web expericence.
To get a first working version it took me 2h and the resulting code was only 50 lines. This includes, starting the webserver, having a html file/form with file upload and serving a file back to the user.
I was using the xgoogle python library for one of my projects. It was working fine till recently. I am not getting the resultset that I used to get before. If anyone who has used this library written by Peter Krummins, faced a similar situation, can you please suggest a work around ?
The presence of BeautifulSoup.py hints that this library uses web scraping to get its result.
A common problem with this is that it will easily break when the design/layout of the page being scraped changes. And the problem you see seems to coincide with the new search results layout that Google introduced just recently.
Another problem is that it often is against the terms of service of the site being scraped. And according to point 5.3 of the Google Terms Of Service it actually is:
You specifically agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services through any automated means (including use of scripts or web crawlers) [...]
A better idea would be to use the Custom Search API.
Peter Krumin's product xgoogle looks to be extremely useful both to me and I image many others.
https://github.com/pkrumins/xgoogle
For me the current version is 1.3 is not working.
I tried a new install from GitHub, ran the examples and nothing is returned.
Adding a debugger to the source code and tracing the data captured in a query to its disappearance the problem occurs in a routine called search.py subroutine "_extract_results" at a parser command
results = soup.findAll('li', {'class': 'g'})
The soup object has material in it but the "findAll" fails to return anything.
Looks like its searching for lists and if there are none it returns nothing.
I am unsure what html you would try to match to get a result.
If anyone knows how to make the is work I am very interested.
A little more googling and it appears xgoogle is no longer supported or works.
Part of the trouble is that Google changes the layout of its results pages every so often and so any scraping software that assumes some standard layout is in time doomed to failure.
There are however other search engines that are locally installed and thus provide a results layout that are less likely change with upgrades and will not change at all if you don't upgrade.
I am currently investigating Yacy. Easy to install and can be pointed at specific sites if you want.
If I add a feed URL to Google Reader or to a desktop feed aggregator, I receive nice results. The URL is:
http://estaticos03.marca.com/rss/futbol_1adivision.xml
But when I fetch the same URL from a script (python script, using feedparser library) I am getting slightly different content for the same results (the title for each entry, for example, is different and all in uppercase).
I believe something is done on the server-side to try to discourage people like me to parse the content for my own projects (the feed is from a popular football newspaper), but I am not sure about it. I tried to pass some user agents (like the google reader one) but still no luck, so maybe they check the IP as well? I am really confused.
Any idea why is this happening to me?
Thanks!
AFAIK Google Reader does some "magic" in the content to beautify it. They strip some tags and styles to avoid breaking their interface.
Can you provide more details on the differences?
Did you changed the user agent of your script? Try to mimic Firefox and see what happen.
All right folks, I found it. I analyzed the source XML received (as #TryPyPy). I had been trusting too much the feedparser library. Latest official version (4.1) has a bug related to mistakeing the title tag from media namespace instead of the original one:
http://code.google.com/p/feedparser/issues/detail?id=76
So I reinstalled from trunk and now everything is OK. Thanks for helping anyway!