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You're reading from  Hands-On Web Scraping with Python - Second Edition

Product typeBook
Published inOct 2023
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781837636211
Edition2nd Edition
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Author (1)
Anish Chapagain
Anish Chapagain
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Anish Chapagain

Anish Chapagain is a software engineer with a passion for data science, its processes, and Python programming, which began around 2007. He has been working with web scraping and analysis-related tasks for more than 5 years, and is currently pursuing freelance projects in the web scraping domain. Anish previously worked as a trainer, web/software developer, and as a banker, where he was exposed to data and gained further insights into topics including data analysis, visualization, data mining, information processing, and knowledge discovery. He has an MSc in computer systems from Bangor University (University of Wales), United Kingdom, and an Executive MBA from Himalayan Whitehouse International College, Kathmandu, Nepal.
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Parsing robots.txt and sitemap.xml

In this section, we will introduce robots.txt- and sitemap.xml-related information and follow the instructions or resources available in those two files. We mentioned them in the Data-finding techniques used in web pages section of Chapter 1. In general, we can dive deep into the pages, or the directory with pages, of websites and find data or manage missing or hidden links using the robots.txt and sitemap.xml files.

The robots.txt file

The robots.txt file, or the Robots Exclusion Protocol, is a web-based standard or protocol used by websites to exchange information with automated scripts. robots.txt carries instructions regarding site-based links or resources to web robots (crawlers, spiders, web wanderers, or web bots), and uses directives such as Allow, Disallow, SiteMap, Crawl-delay, and User-agent to direct robots’ behavior.

We can find robots.txt by adding robots.txt to the main URL. For example, robots.txt for https://www.python...

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Hands-On Web Scraping with Python - Second Edition
Published in: Oct 2023Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781837636211

Author (1)

author image
Anish Chapagain

Anish Chapagain is a software engineer with a passion for data science, its processes, and Python programming, which began around 2007. He has been working with web scraping and analysis-related tasks for more than 5 years, and is currently pursuing freelance projects in the web scraping domain. Anish previously worked as a trainer, web/software developer, and as a banker, where he was exposed to data and gained further insights into topics including data analysis, visualization, data mining, information processing, and knowledge discovery. He has an MSc in computer systems from Bangor University (University of Wales), United Kingdom, and an Executive MBA from Himalayan Whitehouse International College, Kathmandu, Nepal.
Read more about Anish Chapagain