ScrapeNews.py is a Python script that scrapes top news stories from the Associated Press (AP) website and stores them in a CSV file. This script uses the Scrapy library to extract data from HTML pages.
To use this script, simply run it in a Python environment. The scrape_top_news() function will perform the scraping and store the
results in a CSV file called stored_articles.csv.
if __name__ == "__main__":
scrape_top_news()Note that running this script may take a while to execute as there are built-in timers to slow down the scraping process. Additionally, there is a risk of being blacklisted by the site being scraped due to excessive requests.
The scrape_top_news() function executes three main steps:
- Extracts links to top news stories from the AP website.
- Follows each link and extracts the article title and body.
- Stores the link, title, and body for each article in a CSV file.
These steps are performed by two parsing methods within a Scrapy spider:
parse1(): Extracts links to top news stories.parse2(): Follows each link and extracts article title and body.
The spider has built-in timers between requests as an attempt to avoid being labeled as a bot by the AP website.
The output of this script is stored in a CSV file called stored_articles.csv. This file contains three columns:
Link, Title, and Body. The Link column contains URLs to each news story, while the Title column contains the article's title.
The Body column contains the article's content.
This program was created purely for informational purposes and should not be used in violation of any policies or regulations. The user is fully responsible for any effects or implications that using this software may result in. ScrapeNews.py is an effective tool for scraping top news stories from the AP website. It uses Scrapy to extract data from HTML pages and stores it in an easy-to-use CSV file. However, caution should be exercised when running this script as there is a risk of being blacklisted by the site being scraped.