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You're reading from  Web Scraping with Python

Product typeBook
Published inOct 2015
Reading LevelIntermediate
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781782164364
Edition1st Edition
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Richard Penman
Richard Penman
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Richard Penman

Richard Lawson is from Australia and studied Computer Science at the University of Melbourne. Since graduating, he built a business specializing in web scraping while travelling the world, working remotely from over 50 countries. He is a fluent Esperanto speaker, conversational in Mandarin and Korean, and active in contributing to and translating open source software. He is currently undertaking postgraduate studies at Oxford University and in his spare time enjoys developing autonomous drones.
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One million web pages


To test the performance of concurrent downloading, it would be preferable to have a larger target website. For this reason, we will use the Alexa list in this chapter, which tracks the top 1 million most popular websites according to users who have installed the Alexa Toolbar. Only a small percentage of people use this browser plugin, so the data is not authoritative, but is fine for our purposes.

These top 1 million web pages can be browsed on the Alexa website at http://www.alexa.com/topsites. Additionally, a compressed spreadsheet of this list is available at http://s3.amazonaws.com/alexa-static/top-1m.csv.zip, so scraping Alexa is not necessary.

Parsing the Alexa list

The Alexa list is provided in a spreadsheet with columns for the rank and domain:

Extracting this data requires a number of steps, as follows:

  1. Download the .zip file.

  2. Extract the CSV file from this .zip file.

  3. Parse the CSV file.

  4. Iterate each row of the CSV file to extract the domain.

Here is an implementation...

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Web Scraping with Python
Published in: Oct 2015Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781782164364

Author (1)

author image
Richard Penman

Richard Lawson is from Australia and studied Computer Science at the University of Melbourne. Since graduating, he built a business specializing in web scraping while travelling the world, working remotely from over 50 countries. He is a fluent Esperanto speaker, conversational in Mandarin and Korean, and active in contributing to and translating open source software. He is currently undertaking postgraduate studies at Oxford University and in his spare time enjoys developing autonomous drones.
Read more about Richard Penman