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Ask HN: Open source focused crawler?

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Ask HN: Open source focused crawler?

Post by cookerware » Sun, Feb 09, 2014, 9:13 AM UTC

Is there an open source crawler/library that will recursively follow only links under a certain xpath and ignore the rest?

I don't want to do an exhaustive crawl of every single link, I want something that will only follow links under a main content area.

Re: Ask HN: Open source focused crawler?

Post by forkrulassail » Sun, Feb 09, 2014, 9:23 AM UTC

Have you tried BeautifulSoup?

Re: Ask HN: Open source focused crawler?

Post by techaddict009 » Sun, Feb 09, 2014, 9:45 AM UTC

Check this out : http://commoncrawl.org/

Its not exactly what you are looking for but might help you.

Re: Ask HN: Open source focused crawler?

Post by sheraz » Sun, Feb 09, 2014, 12:35 PM UTC

I highly recommend Scrapy (http://www.scrapy.org).

From their site:

Scrapy is a fast high-level screen scraping and web crawling framework, used to crawl websites and extract structured data from their pages. It can be used for a wide range of purposes, from data mining to monitoring and automated testing.

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