Overview¶

Scraping a document consists of three stages:

Building a DOM tree out of the document. This is a straightforward operation for an XML document. For an HTML document, Piculet will first try to convert it into XHTML and then build the tree from that.
Preprocessing the tree. This is an optional stage. In some cases it might be helpful to do some changes on the tree to simplify the extraction process.
Extracting data out of the tree.

The preprocessing and extraction stages are expressed as part of a scraping specification. The specification is a mapping which can be stored in a file format that can represent a mapping, such as JSON or YAML. Details about the specification are given in later chapters.

Command Line Interface¶

Installing Piculet creates a script named piculet which can be used to invoke the command line interface:

$ piculet -h
usage: piculet [-h] [--debug] command ...

The scrape command extracts data out of a document as described by a specification file:

$ piculet scrape -h
usage: piculet scrape [-h] -s SPEC [--html] document

The location of the document can be given as a file path or a URL. For example, say you want to extract some data from the file shining.html. An example specification is given in movie.json. Download both of these files and run the command:

$ piculet scrape -s movie.json shining.html

This should print the following output:

{
  "cast": [
    {
      "character": "Jack Torrance",
      "link": "/people/2",
      "name": "Jack Nicholson"
    },
    {
      "character": "Wendy Torrance",
      "link": "/people/3",
      "name": "Shelley Duvall"
    }
  ],
  "director": {
    "link": "/people/1",
    "name": "Stanley Kubrick"
  },
  "genres": [
    "Horror",
    "Drama"
  ],
  "language": "English",
  "review": "Fantastic movie. Definitely recommended.",
  "runtime": "144 minutes",
  "title": "The Shining",
  "year": 1980
}

For HTML documents, the --html option has to be used. If the document address starts with http:// or https://, the content will be taken from the given URL. For example, to extract some data from the Wikipedia page for David Bowie, download the wikipedia.json file and run the command:

piculet scrape -s wikipedia.json --html "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie"

This should print the following output:

{
  "birthplace": "Brixton, London, England",
  "born": "1947-01-08",
  "name": "David Bowie",
  "occupation": [
    "Singer",
    "songwriter",
    "actor"
  ]
}

In the same command, change the name part of the URL to Merlene_Ottey and you will get similar data for Merlene Ottey. Note that since the markup used in Wikipedia pages for persons varies, the kinds of data you get with this specification will also vary.

Piculet can be used as a simplistic HTML to XHTML convertor by invoking it with the h2x command. This command takes the file name as input and prints the converted content, as in piculet h2x foo.html. If the input file name is given as - it will read the content from the standard input and therefore can be used as part of a pipe: cat foo.html | piculet h2x -

Using in programs¶

The scraping operation can also be invoked programmatically using the scrape_document function. Note that this function prints its output and doesn’t return anything:

from piculet import scrape_document

url = "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie"
spec = "wikipedia.json"
scrape_document(url, spec, content_format="html")

YAML support¶

To use YAML for specification, Piculet has to be installed with YAML support:

pip install piculet[yaml]

Note that this will install an external module for parsing YAML files, and therefore will not be contained to the standard library anymore.

The YAML version of the configuration example above can be found in movie.yaml.