Saturday, 23 August 2014

Scraping data in dynamic sites

I'm trying to scrape data from our local government. What I want is address from kids adoption offices. Here, in Brazil, all adoptions go through the government. So I have the URL of one office, there are 2 or 3 thousands more. But if I can manage to get one, the others will be easy. I made many attempts, bellow I show three.

The problem could be related to a Javascript (Ajax maybe) that refresh the page.

Note: I am not a PHP developer.

First attempt

echo '<html><head></head><body>';
echo '<h1>Scraper PHP GET 1</h1>';

echo ini_get("allow_url_fopen");
echo ini_get("allow_url_fopen");

// I used this url for test
//$url = 'http://www.portaldaadocao.com.br';

//This is the URL that I really want
$url = 'http://www.cnj.jus.br/cna/Controle/ConsultaPublicaBuscaControle.php?transacao=CONSULTA&vara=2673';

$html = file_get_contents($url);
var_dump($html);

echo '</body></html>';

// Output
// 11
// Warning:
file_get_contents(http://www.cnj.jus.br/cna/Controle/ConsultaPublicaBuscaControle.php?
transacao=CONSULTA&vara=2673) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: HTTP
request failed! HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found in /home/rsl/www/sc01_get.php on line 14
// bool(false)

Second attempt

echo '<html><head></head><body>';
echo '<h1>Scraper PHP CURL 3</h1>';

// I used this url for test
//$url = 'http://www.portaldaadocao.com.br';

//This is the URL that I really want
$url = 'http://www.cnj.jus.br/cna/Controle/ConsultaPublicaBuscaControle.php?transacao=CONSULTA&vara=2673';

$curl = curl_init($url);
@curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "foo");
@curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
@curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "POST");;

$html=@curl_exec($curl);

if (!$html) {
    echo "<br />cURL error number:" .curl_errno($curl);
    echo "<br />cURL error:" . curl_error($curl);
    exit;
}
else{
   echo '<br>begin HTML[';
    echo  $html;
   echo '<br>]end html ';
}
echo '</body></html>';

// Output
// 1

third attempt

function curl($url){
    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/535.6 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/16.0.897.0 Safari/535.6');
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, "cookie.txt");
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, "cookie.txt");
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 30);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, "http://www.windowsphone.com");

    $data = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
    return $data;
}

echo '<html><head></head><body>';
echo '<h1>Scraper PHP CURL 5</h1>';

// I used this url for test
//$url = 'http://www.portaldaadocao.com.br';

//This is the URL that I really want
$url = 'http://www.cnj.jus.br/cna/Controle/ConsultaPublicaBuscaControle.php?transacao=CONSULTA&vara=2673';

$curl = curl_init($url);
@curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "foo");
@curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
@curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "POST");;

$html=@curl($curl);


if (!$html) {
    echo "<br />cURL error number:" .curl_errno($curl);
    echo "<br />cURL error:" . curl_error($curl);
    exit;
}
else{
    echo '<br>begin HTML[';
    echo  $html;
    echo '<br>]end html ';
}
echo '</body></html>';

// Output
// cURL error number:0
// cURL error:

If the pages are really ajax based meaning the information that you need to scrape is loaded or shown through javascript execution, you will need another approach. You would need to automate with a real browser. You can go the Selenium route which can be written in a number of languages or use CasperJS with Javascript as the programming language.



Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24611046/scraping-data-in-dynamic-sites

Friday, 22 August 2014

What is the right way of storing screen-scraping data?

i'm working on a web site. it is scraping product details(names, features, prices etc.) from various web sites, processing and displaying them. i'am considering to run update script on each day and keep data fresh.

    scrape data
    process them
    store on database
    read(from db) and display them

i'am already storing all the data in a sql schema but i'm not sure. After each update, all the old records are vanishing. if the scraped new data comes corrupted somehow, there is nothing to show.

so, is there any common way to archive the old data? which one is more convenient: seperate sql schemas or xml files? or something else?

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13686474/what-is-the-right-way-of-storing-screen-scraping-data

Scraping dynamic data

I am scraping profiles on ask.fm for a research question. The problem is that only the top most recent questions are viewable and I have to click "view more" to see the next 15.

The source code for clicking view more looks like this:

<input class="submit-button-more submit-button-more-active" name="commit" onclick="return Forms.More.allowSubmit(this)" type="submit" value="View more" />

What is an easy way of calling this 4 times before scraping it. I want the most recent 60 posts on the site. Python is preferable.

You could probably use selenium to browse to the website and click on the button/link a few times. You can get that here:

    https://pypi.python.org/pypi/selenium

Or you might be able to do it with mechanize:

    http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/mechanize/

I have also heard good things about twill, but never used it myself:

    http://twill.idyll.org/



Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19437782/scraping-dynamic-data

Thursday, 21 August 2014

Web Scraping data from different sites


I am looking for a few ideas on how can I solve a design problem I'm going to be faced with building a web scraper to scrape multiple sites. Writing the scraper(s) is not the problem, matching the data from different sites (which may have small differences) is.

For the sake of being generic assume that I am scraping something like this from two or more different sites:

    public class Data {
        public int id;
        public String firstname;
        public String surname;
        ....
    }

If i scrape this from two different sites, I will encounter the situation where I could have the following:

Site A: id=100, firstname=William, surname=Doe

Site B: id=1974, firstname=Bill, surname=Doe

Essentially, I would like to consider these two sets of data the same (they are the same person but with their name slightly different on each site). I am looking for possible design solutions that can handle this.

The only idea I've come up with is scraping the data from a third location and using it as a reference list. Then when I scrape site A or B I can, over time, build up a list of failures and store them in a list for each scraper so that it can know (if i find id=100 then i know that the firstname will be William etc). I can't help but feel this is a rubbish idea!

If you need any more info, or if you think my description is a bit naff, let me know!

Thanks,

DMcB


Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23970057/web-scraping-data-from-different-sites

Wednesday, 20 August 2014

Scrape Data Point Using Python


I am looking to scrape a data point using Python off of the url http://www.cavirtex.com/orderbook .

The data point I am looking to scrape is the lowest bid offer, which at the current moment looks like this:

<tr>
 <td><b>Jan. 19, 2014, 2:37 a.m.</b></td>
 <td><b>0.0775/0.1146</b></td>
 <td><b>860.00000</b></td>
 <td><b>66.65 CAD</b></td>
</tr>

The relevant point being the 860.00 . I am looking to build this into a script which can send me an email to alert me of certain price differentials compared to other exchanges.

I'm quite noobie so if in your explanations you could offer your thought process on why you've done certain things it would be very much appreciated.

Thank you in advance!

Edit: This is what I have so far which will return me the name of the title correctly, I'm having trouble grabbing the table data though.

import urllib2, sys
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

site= "http://cavirtex.com/orderbook"
hdr = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'}
req = urllib2.Request(site,headers=hdr)
page = urllib2.urlopen(req)
soup = BeautifulSoup(page)
print soup.title



Here is the code for scraping the lowest bid from the 'Buying BTC' table:

from selenium import webdriver

fp = webdriver.FirefoxProfile()
browser = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_profile=fp)
browser.get('http://www.cavirtex.com/orderbook')

lowest_bid = float('inf')
elements = browser.find_elements_by_xpath('//div[@id="orderbook_buy"]/table/tbody/tr/td')

for element in elements:
    text = element.get_attribute('innerHTML').strip('<b>|</b>')
    try:
        bid = float(text)
        if lowest_bid > bid:
            lowest_bid = bid
    except:
        pass

browser.quit()
print lowest_bid

In order to install Selenium for Python on your Windows-PC, run from a command line:

pip install selenium (or pip install selenium --upgrade if you already have it).

If you want the 'Selling BTC' table instead, then change "orderbook_buy" to "orderbook_sell".

If you want the 'Last Trades' table instead, then change "orderbook_buy" to "orderbook_trades".

Note:

If you consider performance critical, then you can implement the data-scraping via URL-Connection instead of Selenium, and have your program running much faster. However, your code will probably end up being a lot "messier", due to the tedious XML parsing that you'll be obliged to apply...

Here is the code for sending the previous output in an email from yourself to yourself:

import smtplib,ssl

def SendMail(username,password,contents):
    server = Connect(username)
    try:
        server.login(username,password)
        server.sendmail(username,username,contents)
    except smtplib.SMTPException,error:
        Print(error)
    Disconnect(server)

def Connect(username):
    serverName = username[username.index("@")+1:username.index(".")]
    while True:
        try:
            server = smtplib.SMTP(serverDict[serverName])
        except smtplib.SMTPException,error:
            Print(error)
            continue
        try:
            server.ehlo()
            if server.has_extn("starttls"):
                server.starttls()
                server.ehlo()
        except (smtplib.SMTPException,ssl.SSLError),error:
            Print(error)
            Disconnect(server)
            continue
        break
    return server

def Disconnect(server):
    try:
        server.quit()
    except smtplib.SMTPException,error:
        Print(error)

serverDict = {
    "gmail"  :"smtp.gmail.com",
    "hotmail":"smtp.live.com",
    "yahoo"  :"smtp.mail.yahoo.com"
}

SendMail("your_username@your_provider.com","your_password",str(lowest_bid))

The above code should work if your email provider is either gmail or hotmail or yahoo.

Please note that depending on your firewall configuration, it may ask your permission upon the first time you try it...



Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21217034/scrape-data-point-using-python

Sunday, 17 August 2014

Has It Been Done Before? Optimize Your Patent Search Using Patent Scraping Technology

Has it been done before? Optimize your Patent Search using Patent Scraping Technology.

Since the US patent office opened in 1790, inventors across the United States have been submitting all sorts of great products and half-baked ideas to their database. Nowadays, many individuals get ideas for great products only to have the patent office do a patent search and tell them that their ideas have already been patented by someone else! Herin lies a question: How do I perform a patent search to find out if my invention has already been patented before I invest time and money into developing it?

The US patent office patent search database is available to anyone with internet access.

US Patent Search Homepage


Performing a patent search with the patent searching tools on the US Patent office webpage can prove to be a very time consuming process. For example, patent searching the database for "dog" and "food" yields 5745 patent search results. The straight-forward approach to investigating the patent search results for your particular idea is to go through all 5745 results one at a time looking for yours. Get some munchies and settle in, this could take a while! The patent search database sorts results by patent number instead of relevancy. This means that if your idea was recently patented, you will find it near the top but if it wasn't, you could be searching for quite a while. Also, most patent search results have images associated with them. Downloading and displaying these images over the internet can be very time consuming depending on you internet connection and the availability of the patent search database servers.

Because patent searches take such a long time, many companies and organizations are looking ways to improve the process. Some organizations and companies will hire employees for the sole purpose of performing patent searches for them. Others contract out the job to small business that specialize in patent searches. The latest technology for performing patent searches is called patent scraping.

Patent scraping is the process of writing computer automated scripts that analyze a website and copy only the content you are interested in into easily accessible databases or spreadsheets on your computer. Because it is a computerized script performing the patent search, you don't need a separate employee to get the data, you can let it run the patent scraping while you perform other important tasks! Patent scraping technology can also extract text content from images. By saving the images and textual content to your computer, you can then very efficiently search them for content and relevancy; thus saving you lots of time that could be better spent actually inventing something!

To put a real-world face on this, let us consider the pharmaceutical industry. Many different companies are competing for the patent on the next big drug. It has become an indispensible tactic of the industry for one company to perform patent searches for what patents the other companies are applying for, thus learning in which direction the research and development team of the other company is taking them. Using this information, the company can then choose to either pursue that direction heavily, or spin off in a different direction. It would quickly become very costly to maintain a team of researchers dedicated to only performing patent searches all day. Patent scraping technology is the means for figuring out what ideas and technologies are coming about before they make headline news. It is by utilizing patent scraping technology that the large companies stay up to date on the latest trends in technology.

While some companies choose to hire their own programming team to do their patent scraping scripts for them, it is much more cost effective to contract out the job to a qualified team of programmers dedicated to performing such services.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Has-It-Been-Done-Before?-Optimize-Your-Patent-Search-Using-Patent-Scraping-Technology&id=171000

Tuesday, 12 August 2014

Collecting Data With Web Scrapers

There is a large amount of data available only through websites. However, as many people have found out, trying to copy data into a usable database or spreadsheet directly out of a website can be a tiring process. Data entry from internet sources can quickly become cost prohibitive as the required hours add up. Clearly, an automated method for collating information from HTML-based sites can offer huge management cost savings.

Web scrapers are programs that are able to aggregate information from the internet. They are capable of navigating the web, assessing the contents of a site, and then pulling data points and placing them into a structured, working database or spreadsheet. Many companies and services will use programs to web scrape, such as comparing prices, performing online research, or tracking changes to online content.

Let's take a look at how web scrapers can aid data collection and management for a variety of purposes.

Improving On Manual Entry Methods

Using a computer's copy and paste function or simply typing text from a site is extremely inefficient and costly. Web scrapers are able to navigate through a series of websites, make decisions on what is important data, and then copy the info into a structured database, spreadsheet, or other program. Software packages include the ability to record macros by having a user perform a routine once and then have the computer remember and automate those actions. Every user can effectively act as their own programmer to expand the capabilities to process websites. These applications can also interface with databases in order to automatically manage information as it is pulled from a website.

Aggregating Information

There are a number of instances where material stored in websites can be manipulated and stored. For example, a clothing company that is looking to bring their line of apparel to retailers can go online for the contact information of retailers in their area and then present that information to sales personnel to generate leads. Many businesses can perform market research on prices and product availability by analyzing online catalogues.

Data Management

Managing figures and numbers is best done through spreadsheets and databases; however, information on a website formatted with HTML is not readily accessible for such purposes. While websites are excellent for displaying facts and figures, they fall short when they need to be analyzed, sorted, or otherwise manipulated. Ultimately, web scrapers are able to take the output that is intended for display to a person and change it to numbers that can be used by a computer. Furthermore, by automating this process with software applications and macros, entry costs are severely reduced.

This type of data management is also effective at merging different information sources. If a company were to purchase research or statistical information, it could be scraped in order to format the information into a database. This is also highly effective at taking a legacy system's contents and incorporating them into today's systems.

Overall, a web scraper is a cost effective user tool for data manipulation and management.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Collecting-Data-With-Web-Scrapers&id=4223877