Cyborg is an asyncio Python 3 web scraping framework that helps you write programs to extract information from websites by reading and inspecting their HTML.
Scraping websites for data can be fairly complex when you are dealing with data across multiple pages, request limits and error handling. Cyborg aims to handle all of this for you transparently, so that you can focus on the actual extraction of data rather than all the stuff around it. It does this by helping you break the process down into smaller chunks, which can be combined into a Pipeline, for example below is a Pipeline that scrapes takeaway reviews from Just-Eat (the complete example can be found in examples/just-eat):
with open("output.json", "w") as output_fd:
pipeline = Job("ReviewScraper") | scrape_places | unique("id") | scrape_reviews.parallel(5)
pipeline < string.ascii_lowercase
pipeline > output_fd
pipeline.monitor() > sys.stdout
pipeline.run_until_complete()
The pipeline has several stages:
-
scrape_places- This scrapes the list of takeaways from a particular area. The area is found by the first letter of the postcode, so we brute-force this by inputting a-z (pipeline < string.ascii_lowercase) -
unique('id')- Takeaways may serve more than one area, this filters out any duplicate takeaways based on their ID -
scrape_reviews.parallel(5)- This starts 5 parallel tasks to scrape the reviews from a particular takeaway.