Welcome to scrawler’s documentation!¶
“scrawler” = “scraper” + “crawler”
Provides functionality for the automatic collection of website data
(web scraping) and
following links to map an entire domain
(crawling). It can
handle these tasks individually, or process several websites/domains in
parallel using asyncio
and multithreading
.
This project was initially developed while working at the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research. Many thanks for the opportunity and support!
Installation¶
You can install scrawler from PyPI:
pip install scrawler
Note
Alternatively, you can find the .whl
and .tar.gz
files on GitHub
for each respective release.
Getting Started¶
Check out the Getting Started Guide.
Important concepts and classes¶
Website
Object¶
Basic object to contain information on one website. This is basically a wrapper around a BeautifulSoup object constructed from a website’s HTML text, adding additional information such as the URL and its parts and the HTTP response when fetching the website.
Crawling/Scraping attribute objects¶
Used for specifying options for the crawling/scraping processes, like what data to collect, which URLs to include and where to save the data.
Specify which data to collect/search for in the website. |
|
Specify how and where to export the collected data. |
|
Specify how to conduct the crawling, including filtering irrelevant URLs or limiting the number of crawled URLs. |