scrapelib is a library for making requests to websites, particularly those that may be less-than-reliable.
scrapelib originated as part of the Open States project to scrape the websites of all 50 state legislatures and as a result was therefore designed with features desirable when dealing with sites that have intermittent errors or require rate-limiting.
As of version 0.7 scrapelib has been retooled to take advantage of the superb requests library.
Advantages of using scrapelib over alternatives like httplib2 simply using requests as-is:
- All of the power of the suberb requests library.
- HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP requests via an identical API
- support for simple caching with pluggable cache backends
- request throttling
- configurable retries for non-permanent site failures
- optional robots.txt compliance
scrapelib is a project of Sunlight Labs (c) 2013. All code is released under a BSD-style license, see LICENSE for details.
Written by James Turk <jturk@sunlightfoundation.com>
- Contributors:
- Michael Stephens - initial urllib2/httplib2 version
- Joe Germuska - fix for IPython embedding
- Alex Chiang - fix to test suite
- python 2.7 or 3.3
- requests >= 1.0
scrapelib is available on PyPI and can be installed via pip install scrapelib
PyPI package: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/scrapelib
Source: http://github.com/sunlightlabs/scrapelib
Documentation: http://scrapelib.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
import scrapelib
s = scrapelib.Scraper(requests_per_minute=10, allow_cookies=True,
follow_robots=True)
# Grab Google front page
s.urlopen('http://google.com')
# Will raise RobotExclusionError
s.urlopen('http://google.com/search')
# Will be throttled to 10 HTTP requests per minute
while True:
s.urlopen('http://example.com')