A Basic Website Crawler, in Python, in 12 Lines of Code.

Your first, very basic web crawler.

Hello again. Today I will show you how to code a web crawler, and only use up 12 lines of code (excluding whitespaces and comments).

Requirements

• Python
• A website with lot's of links!

Layout the logic.

OK, as far as crawlers (web spiders) go, this one cannot be more basic. Well, it can, if you remove lines 11-12, but then it's about as useful as a broken pencil - there's just no point. (Get it? Hehe...he...Im a sad person... )

So what does a webcrawler do? Well, it scours a page for URL's (in our case) and puts them in a neat list. But it does not stop there. Nooooo sir. It then iterates through each found url, goes into it, and retrieves the URL's in that page. And so on (if you code it further).

What we are coding is a very scaled down version of what makes google its millions. Well it used to be. Now it's 50% searches, 20% advertising, 10% users' profile sales and 20% data theft. But hey, who's counting.

This has a LOT of potential, and should you wish to expand on it, I'd love to see what you come up with.

So let's plan the program.

The logic here is fairly straightforward:

• user enters the beginning url
• crawler goes in, and goes through the source code, gethering all URL's inside
• crawler then visits each url in another for loop, gathering child url's from the initial parent urls.
• profit???

The Code:

#! C:\python27

import re, urllib

textfile = file('depth_1.txt','wt')

print "Enter the URL you wish to crawl.."

print 'Usage  - "http://phocks.org/stumble/creepy/" <-- With the double quotes'

myurl = input("@> ")

for i in re.findall('''href=["'](.[^"']+)["']''', urllib.urlopen(myurl).read(), re.I):

        print i 

        for ee in re.findall('''href=["'](.[^"']+)["']''', urllib.urlopen(i).read(), re.I):

                print ee

                textfile.write(ee+'\n')

textfile.close()

That's it... No really.. That. Is. It.

So we create a file called depth_1. We prompt the user for entry of a url

Which should be entered in the following format -"http://www.google.com/"

With the quotation.

Then we loop through the page we passed, parse the source and return urls, get the child urls, write them to the file. Print the url's on the screen and close the file.

Done!

Finishing Statement

So, I hope this aids you in some way, and again, if you improve on it - please share it with us!

Regards

Mr.F