Single page linear scrapersΒΆ
For this example, we will extract content from a pyvideo page. Let us consider the following page.
To generate a skeleton configuration file, use the genconfig
command. The primary arguments for the command are the project name and the URL of the base page.
$ scrapple genconfig pyvideo \
> http://pyvideo.org/video/1785/python-for-humans-1
This will create pyvideo.json which will initially look like this -
{
"scraping": {
"url": "http://pyvideo.org/video/1785/python-for-humans-1",
"data": [
{
"field": "",
"attr": "",
"selector": "",
"default": ""
}
]
},
"project_name": "pyvideo",
"selector_type": "xpath"
}
You can edit this json file to specify selectors for the various data that you would want to extract from the given page.
For example,
{
"scraping": {
"url": "http://pyvideo.org/video/1785/python-for-humans-1",
"data": [
{
"field": "title",
"attr": "text",
"selector": "//h3",
"default": ""
},
{
"field": "speaker_name",
"attr": "text",
"selector": "//div[@id='sidebar']//dd[2]//a",
"default": ""
},
{
"field": "speaker_link",
"attr": "href",
"selector": "//div[@id='sidebar']//dd[2]//a",
"default": ""
},
{
"field": "event_name",
"attr": "text",
"selector": "//div[@id='sidebar']//dd[1]//a",
"default": ""
},
{
"field": "event_link",
"attr": "href",
"selector": "//div[@id='sidebar']//dd[1]//a",
"default": ""
}
]
},
"project_name": "pyvideo",
"selector_type": "xpath"
}
Using this configuration file, you could generate a Python script using scrapple generate
or directly run the scraper using scrapple run
.
The generate
and run
commands take two positional arguments - the project name and the output file name.
To generate the Python script -
$ scrapple generate pyvideo talk1
This will create talk1.py, which is the script that can be run to replicate the action of scrapple run
.
from __future__ import print_function
import json
import os
from scrapple.selectors.xpath import XpathSelector
def task_pyvideo():
"""
Script generated using
`Scrapple <http://scrappleapp.github.io/scrapple>`_
"""
results = dict()
results['project'] = "pyvideo"
results['data'] = list()
try:
r0 = dict()
page0 = XpathSelector(
"http://pyvideo.org/video/1785/python-for-humans-1"
)
r0["title"] = page0.extract_content(
"//h3", "text", ""
)
r0["speaker_name"] = page0.extract_content(
"//div[@id='sidebar']//dd[2]//a", "text", ""
)
r0["speaker_link"] = page0.extract_content(
"//div[@id='sidebar']//dd[2]//a", "href", ""
)
r0["event_name"] = page0.extract_content(
"//div[@id='sidebar']//dd[1]//a", "text", ""
)
r0["event_link"] = page0.extract_content(
"//div[@id='sidebar']//dd[1]//a", "href", ""
)
results['data'].append(r0)
except KeyboardInterrupt:
pass
except Exception as e:
print(e)
finally:
with open(os.path.join(os.getcwd(), 'talk1.json'), 'w') as f:
json.dump(results, f)
if __name__ == '__main__':
task_pyvideo()
To run the scraper -
$ scrapple run pyvideo talk1
This will create talk1.json, which contains the extracted information.
{
"project": "test1",
"data": [
{
"event_name": "PyCon US 2013",
"event_link": "/category/33/pycon-us-2013",
"speaker_link": "/speaker/726/kenneth-reitz",
"speaker_name": "Kenneth Reitz",
"title": "Python for Humans"
}
]
}