pycrawl

A simple crawling utility for Python

Description

This project enables site crawling and data extraction with xpath and css selectors. You can also send forms such as text data, files, and checkboxes.

Requirement

Python3

Usage

Description of Instance Methods

name	Description
send	Set the value you want to submit to the form.
submit	Submit form.
css	Get node by css selector.
xpath	Get node by xpath.
attr	Get node's attribute.
inner_text	Get node's inner text.
outer_text	Get node's outer text.

Simple Example

import pycrawl

url = 'http://www.example.com/'
doc = pycrawl.PyCrawl(
	url,
	user_agent='<user agent>',
	timeout=<timeout sec>,
	encoding=<encoding>,
)

# access another url
doc.get('another url')

# get current url
doc.url

# get current site's html
doc.html

# get <table> tags as dict
doc.table

Scraping Example

# search for nodes by css selector
# tag   : css('name')
# class : css('.name')
# id    : css('#name')
doc.css('div')
doc.css('.main-text')
doc.css('#tadjs')

# search for nodes by xpath
doc.xpath('//*[@id="top"]/div[1]')

# other example
doc.css('div').css('a')[2].attr('href') # => string object
doc.css('p').inner_text() # => string object
# You do not need to specify "[]" to access the first index

Submitting Form Example

Specify target node's attribute
Specify value(int or str) / selected(bool) / file_name(str)
call submit() with form attribute specified

# login
doc.send(id='id attribute', value='value to send')
doc.send(id='id attribute', value='value to send')
doc.submit(id='id attribute') # submit

# post file
doc.send(id='id attribute', file_name='target file name')

# checkbox
doc.send(id='id attribute', selected=True)  # check
doc.send(id='id attribute', selected=False) # uncheck

# example of specify other attribute
doc.send(name='name attribute', value='hello')
doc.send(class_='class attribute', value=100)
# when specifying the class attribute, please write "class_ =".

Installation

$ pip install pycrawl

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/averak/pycrawl.