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Web Crawler

This is a multi-thread webpage crawler, written with Python, that takes a start webpage and data selectors as inputs and outputs information you care to a file. The crawler crawls webpages recursively. The whole process works like a pipe. The crawling outputs of previous webpage will serve as inputs to crawling next webpage. For details, refer to Usage section below.

Prerequisities

  1. Python 2.7.3 at least
  2. BeautifulSoup, argparse, httplib2 lib

Usage

The crawler will be run through command line by specifying some necessary and optional arguments

E.g. python crawler.py [args]

Arguments:

  • Required Arguments:

     -url: The url of starting webpage. This is the first webpage to start crawling.
       This url may contain configurable fields surrounded by curly braces.
       The values of the configurable fields are determined by a helper module --- BaseUrlPopulator
 -selectors: The crawling instruction string always with the following format
 	        **data_type|data_source|data_org|css_selector**
 	        Crawler accepts multiple selectors for one webpage. When specifying multiple,
 	        they should be separated by comma
 			**data_type:** value can be either "redirection" or "information"
     		    "redirection": data is urls(absolute/relative) that crawler needs to jump to
 	    	    "information": data is the info we cared.
 	        **data_source:** value can be either "element" or "attribute"
 		        "element": data is stored as the text value in an html tag
 		        "attribute": data is stored as the attribute of an html tag
 		     	Here, particular attribute name is needed for crawler to extract data.
 		     	The attribute name should be immediately following "attribute" string
 		     	with space as delimeter.
 				E.g. attribute href --- get the href value of a matching html tag
 	        **data_org:** value can be either "separate" or "combination".
 	                      Indicate how to organize extracted data
 		                  This only make sense when there exist a list of matching tags
 		                  after applying css selectors.
 		                  Since each matching tag will give us data, we can choose
 		                  either passing all these data to next webpage
 		                  (when these data are highly correlated.
 		                  Will be in one line in file separated by tab)
 		                  or passing each of them to each of the redirection
 		                  webpage correspondingly
 		                  "separate": used when EACH data in list is for one record
 		                  "combination": used when ALL data in list are for one record
 	        **css_selector:** CSS selectors to select html elements in DOM tree
 -thread: The max number of threads that can be started for the crawling task (Not including the main thread)

  • Optional Arguments:

     -domain: The domain of the website being crawled.
          This is necessary when current webpage contains redirection links,
          specified as relative path, that the crawler needs to jump to for further crawling

Examples:

python crawler_mt.py -domain "http://www.yellowpages.com" -url "http://www.yellowpages.com/search?search_terms=event+coordinate&geo_location_terms={city}+WA&page={page}" -css "redirection|attribute href|separate|div.v-card > div.info > h3.n > a" "information|element|combination|div.sales-info > h1, information|attribute href|combination|div.business-card > section > footer > a.email-business" -thread 2

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