Handwritten Document Entry: August 2014

Wednesday, 27 August 2014

Extract data from Web Scraping C#

I am MVC ASP.NET developer.

I have received the contents from any url, i.e. http, https etc. using WebRequest class.

I have received all the content of that particular url. (for now I took http://google.com)

My next step is to extract buttons, header, footer, colors, text etc.

Here is my code for now:

public ActionResult GetContent(UrlModel model) //model having a string URL
which is entered in a text box and method hits using submit button.
{
    //WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(model.URL);

    WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(model.URL);

    request.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;

    WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();

    Stream dataStream = response.GetResponseStream();

    StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(dataStream);

    string responseFromServer = reader.ReadToEnd();
    ViewBag.Response = responseFromServer;

    reader.Close();
    response.Close();
    return View();
}

Can someone help me with writing the code ?

Also do suggest me with some techniques of data extraction in C#.

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21901162/extract-data-from-web-scraping-c-sharp

Scrapy, scraping price data from StubHub

I've been having a difficult time with this one.

I want to scrape all the prices listed for this Bruno Mars concert at the Hollywood Bowl so I can get the average price.

http://www.stubhub.com/bruno-mars-tickets/bruno-mars-hollywood-hollywood-bowl-31-5-2014-4449604/

I've located the prices in the HTML and the xpath is pretty straightforward but I cannot get any values to return.

I think it has something to do with the content being generated via javascript or ajax but I can't figure out how to send the correct request to get the code to work.

Here's what I have:

from scrapy.spider import BaseSpider
from scrapy.selector import Selector

from deeptix.items import DeeptixItem

class TicketSpider(BaseSpider):
    name = "deeptix"
    allowed_domains = ["stubhub.com"]
    start_urls = ["http://www.stubhub.com/bruno-mars-tickets/bruno-mars-hollywood-hollywood-bowl-31-5-2014-4449604/"]

def parse(self, response):
    sel = Selector(response)
    sites = sel.xpath('//div[contains(@class, "q_cont")]')
    items = []
    for site in sites:
        item = DeeptixItem()
        item['price'] = site.xpath('span[contains(@class, "q")]/text()').extract()
        items.append(item)
    return items

Any help would be greatly appreciated I've been struggling with this one for quite some time now. Thank you in advance!

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22770917/scrapy-scraping-price-data-from-stubhub

Tuesday, 26 August 2014

How do you scrape AJAX pages?

Overview:

All screen scraping first requires manual review of the page you want to extract resources from. When dealing with AJAX you usually just need to analyze a bit more than just simply the HTML.

When dealing with AJAX this just means that the value you want is not in the initial HTML document that you requested, but that javascript will be exectued which asks the server for the extra information you want.

You can therefore usually simply analyze the javascript and see which request the javascript makes and just call this URL instead from the start.

Example:

Take this as an example, assume the page you want to scrape from has the following script:

<script type="text/javascript">
function ajaxFunction()
{
var xmlHttp;
try
{
// Firefox, Opera 8.0+, Safari
xmlHttp=new XMLHttpRequest();
}
catch (e)
{
// Internet Explorer
try
    {
    xmlHttp=new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP");
    }
catch (e)
    {
    try
      {
      xmlHttp=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
      }
    catch (e)
      {
      alert("Your browser does not support AJAX!");
      return false;
      }
    }
}
xmlHttp.onreadystatechange=function()
    {
    if(xmlHttp.readyState==4)
      {
      document.myForm.time.value=xmlHttp.responseText;
      }
    }
xmlHttp.open("GET","time.asp",true);
xmlHttp.send(null);
}
</script>

Then all you need to do is instead do an HTTP request to time.asp of the same server instead. Example from w3schools.

Sporce: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/260540/how-do-you-scrape-ajax-pages

using Perl to scrape a website

I am interested in writing a perl script that goes to the following link and extracts the number 1975: https://familysearch.org/search/collection/results#count=20&query=%2Bevent_place_level_1%3ACalifornia%20%2Bevent_place_level_2%3A%22San%20Diego%22%20%2Bbirth_year%3A1923-1923~%20%2Bgender%3AM%20%2Brace%3AWhite&collection_id=2000219

That website is the amount of white men born in the year 1923 who live in San Diego County, California in 1940. I am trying to do this in a loop structure to generalize over multiple counties and birth years.

In the file, locations.txt, I put the list of counties, such as San Diego County.

The current code runs, but instead of the # 1975, it displays unknown. The number 1975 should be in $val\n.

I would very much appreciate any help!

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

use LWP::Simple;

open(L, "locations26.txt");

my $url = 'https://familysearch.org/search/collection/results#count=20&query=%2Bevent_place_level_1%3A%22California%22%20%2Bevent_place_level_2%3A%22%LOCATION%%22%20%2Bbirth_year%3A%YEAR%-%YEAR%~%20%2Bgender%3AM%20%2Brace%3AWhite&collection_id=2000219';

open(O, ">out26.txt");
my $oldh = select(O);
$| = 1;
select($oldh);
while (my $location = <L>) {
     chomp($location);
     $location =~ s/ /+/g;
      foreach my $year (1923..1923) {
                 my $u = $url;
                 $u =~ s/%LOCATION%/$location/;
                 $u =~ s/%YEAR%/$year/;
                 #print "$u\n";
                 my $content = get($u);
                 my $val = 'unknown';
                 if ($content =~ / of .strong.([0-9,]+)..strong. /) {
                         $val = $1;
                 }
                 $val =~ s/,//g;
                 $location =~ s/\+/ /g;
                 print "'$location',$year,$val\n";
                 print O "'$location',$year,$val\n";
         }
     }

Update: API is not a viable solution. I have been in contact with the site developer. The API does not apply to that part of the webpage. Hence, any solution pertaining to JSON will not be applicbale.

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14654288/using-perl-to-scrape-a-website

Monday, 25 August 2014

Data Scraping using php

Here is my code

    $ip=$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];

    $url=file_get_contents("http://whatismyipaddress.com/ip/$ip");

    preg_match_all('/<th>(.*?)<\/th><td>(.*?)<\/td>/s',$url,$output,PREG_SET_ORDER);

    $isp=$output[1][2];

    $city=$output[9][2];

    $state=$output[8][2];

    $zipcode=$output[12][2];

    $country=$output[7][2];

    ?>
    <body>
    <table align="center">
    <tr><td>ISP :</td><td><?php echo $isp;?></td></tr>
    <tr><td>City :</td><td><?php echo $city;?></td></tr>
    <tr><td>State :</td><td><?php echo $state;?></td></tr>
    <tr><td>Zipcode :</td><td><?php echo $zipcode;?></td></tr>
    <tr><td>Country :</td><td><?php echo $country;?></td></tr>
    </table>
    </body>

How do I find out the ISP provider of a person viewing a PHP page?

Is it possible to use PHP to track or reveal it?

Error: http://i.imgur.com/LGWI8.png

Curl Scrapping

<?php
$curl_handle=curl_init();
curl_setopt( $curl_handle, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true );
$url='http://www.whatismyipaddress.com/ip/132.123.23.23';
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, Array("User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.15) Gecko/20080623 Firefox/2.0.0.15") );
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Your application name');
$query = curl_exec($curl_handle);

curl_close($curl_handle);
preg_match_all('/<th>(.*?)<\/th><td>(.*?)<\/td>/s',$url,$output,PREG_SET_ORDER);
echo $query;
$isp=$output[1][2];

$city=$output[9][2];

$state=$output[8][2];

$zipcode=$output[12][2];

$country=$output[7][2];
?>
<body>
<table align="center">
<tr><td>ISP :</td><td><?php echo $isp;?></td></tr>
<tr><td>City :</td><td><?php echo $city;?></td></tr>
<tr><td>State :</td><td><?php echo $state;?></td></tr>
<tr><td>Zipcode :</td><td><?php echo $zipcode;?></td></tr>
<tr><td>Country :</td><td><?php echo $country;?></td></tr>
</table>
</body>

Error: http://i.imgur.com/FJIq6.png

What's is wrong with my code here? Any alternative code , that i can use here.

I am not able to scrape that data as described here. http://i.imgur.com/FJIq6.png

P.S. Please post full code. It would be easier for me to understand.

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10461088/data-scraping-using-php

PDF scraping using R

I have been using the XML package successfully for extracting HTML tables but want to extend to PDF's. From previous questions it does not appear that there is a simple R solution but wondered if there had been any recent developments

Failing that, is there some way in Python (in which I am a complete Novice) to obtain and manipulate pdfs so that I could finish the job off with the R XML package

Extracting text from PDFs is hard, and nearly always requires lots of care.

I'd start with the command line tools such as pdftotext and see what they spit out. The problem is that PDFs can store the text in any order, can use awkward font encodings, and can do things like use ligature characters (the joined up 'ff' and 'ij' that you see in proper typesetting) to throw you.

pdftotext is installable on any Linux system

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7918718/pdf-scraping-using-r

Data Scraping using php

PDF scraping using R

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

Wednesday, 20 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

Tuesday, 19 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

Friday, 1 August 2014

SEO Copywriting Training - 3 Reasons to Learn This Lucrative Form of Freelance Writing

Here we're going discuss why SEO copywriting is an excellent career choice for anyone who wants to make good money, work from home and get started almost immediately.

Freelance writing has a reputation for being a low-paying career where jobs are hard to come by. It's almost like some type of professional caste system where some seem to make a lot of money effortlessly, while others scrape by on anything they can get (eg, $3 article writing gigs).

It doesn't have to be this way because there's a new type of writing taking over the web. And, if you know how to do it, you can easily make $100-$250+/day. What is it?

SEO Copywriting.

Following are three excellent reasons to train for this lucrative career.

1. Never Ending Need for Content: Anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 new websites go live every day. This means the web is an increasingly crowded marketplace. Hence, businesses have to find ways to increase their chances of being found online.

Smart business owners, webmasters and bloggers know that SEO content is one of the best ways to go about it. So they invest in this type of content. And, as they constantly need fresh content to stay ahead of the competition, this means freelance writers who know how to provide it stay busy.

2. It's Flexible: Like freelance writing in general, SEO copywriting is a very flexible career. You can work from a coffee shop in New York, a hotel terrace in Jamaica, or a restaurant in South Beach, Miami. As long as there's an internet connection, you can get your work done.

An added bonus in SEO copywriting is that there's very little client interaction. Once they provide you with their keyword phrases, clients rarely need to be in contact with you. They give you keywords and a deadline, and you write the copy and return it via email. Beautiful!

3. Less Competition: There are many freelance writers -- hundreds of thousands, perhaps even a few million. But, very few of them know how to write SEO content. This means there's less competition for these types of writing assignments.

Just how important is an SEO copywriter to webmasters, bloggers, internet marketers -- and/or anyone who wants to be found online?

ln the SearcheEngineWatch article, The SEO Copywriter: Wordsmithing the WebWillam Flaiz underscores the importance of the SEO copywriter. He writes:

The role of the agency SEO copywriter is unique because. . . . Suddenly, the writer must optimize press releases, craft articles for social news, monitor social network communications, and develop wiki content. . . . a strong SEO copywriter is adaptable and capable of internalizing a lot of new information extremely quickly. These unique individuals have fast become the backbone of many SEO engagements. If content is king, then they [SEO copywriters] are the kingmakers.

If you want a high-paying , work-from-anywhere you please career, get SEO copywriting training -- and be well on your way to running your own successful freelance writing business.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?SEO-Copywriting-Training---3-Reasons-to-Learn-This-Lucrative-Form-of-Freelance-Writing&id=2943036