grabber

Grabber is a concurrent declarative web scraper and downloader.

Features:

• Simple tree-like JSON configuration
• XPath and Regexp extractors
• Parallel parsing and extraction
• Parallel download
• Ability to bail out early (e.g. for updating)
• Fails fast on config errors, tolerates web errors
• Follow, every, and single extraction modes
• Multiple XPaths or Regexps per stage
• Multi-grouped regexps with a separator (e.g. extract to CSV)
• It's rather fast

Run grabber -h to see command-line options.

See examples/ directory and consult the code to learn the format of the config files.

Note that for tumblr.json you'll need to replace all occurrences of {{name}} with a proper account (subdomain) name and all occurrences of {{paging}} with the (XPath's text() operator) contents of what your target blog uses for 'next page' (or semantically equivalent). You may also notice that the format is already template-friendly, so you can easily write a script for generating per-blog templates.

The examples provided are certainly not exhaustive.

Advice:

Remember you can build your config iteratively by using the log command, so that you make sure the current level works as it should before going further.

When downloading:

For the first run set bail to 0 and use options -quiet -stdout, you may also wish to pipe the output of the run to tee log. Then inspect the output/logfile for any errors. If it looks ok set bail to something reasonable e.g. if you have 10 assets per page set it to 20.

Todo / Bugs

• Needs testing 'in the wild'
• Better documentation
• Ability to use Content-Disposition
• Full config parsing and error checking during load
• Test suite

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2014 Piotr S. Staszewski

Absolutely no warranty. See LICENSE.txt for details.