urllib.robotparser — Parser for robots.txt (original) (raw)

Source code: Lib/urllib/robotparser.py

This module provides a single class, RobotFileParser, which answers questions about whether or not a particular user agent can fetch a URL on the web site that published the robots.txt file. For more details on the structure of robots.txt files, see http://www.robotstxt.org/orig.html.

class urllib.robotparser.RobotFileParser(url='')¶

This class provides methods to read, parse and answer questions about therobots.txt file at url.

set_url(url)¶

Sets the URL referring to a robots.txt file.

read()¶

Reads the robots.txt URL and feeds it to the parser.

parse(lines)¶

Parses the lines argument.

can_fetch(useragent, url)¶

Returns True if the useragent is allowed to fetch the _url_according to the rules contained in the parsed robots.txtfile.

mtime()¶

Returns the time the robots.txt file was last fetched. This is useful for long-running web spiders that need to check for newrobots.txt files periodically.

modified()¶

Sets the time the robots.txt file was last fetched to the current time.

crawl_delay(useragent)¶

Returns the value of the Crawl-delay parameter from robots.txtfor the useragent in question. If there is no such parameter or it doesn’t apply to the useragent specified or the robots.txt entry for this parameter has invalid syntax, return None.

Added in version 3.6.

request_rate(useragent)¶

Returns the contents of the Request-rate parameter fromrobots.txt as a named tuple RequestRate(requests, seconds). If there is no such parameter or it doesn’t apply to the _useragent_specified or the robots.txt entry for this parameter has invalid syntax, return None.

Added in version 3.6.

site_maps()¶

Returns the contents of the Sitemap parameter fromrobots.txt in the form of a list(). If there is no such parameter or the robots.txt entry for this parameter has invalid syntax, return None.

Added in version 3.8.

The following example demonstrates basic use of the RobotFileParserclass:

import urllib.robotparser rp = urllib.robotparser.RobotFileParser() rp.set_url("http://www.musi-cal.com/robots.txt") rp.read() rrate = rp.request_rate("") rrate.requests 3 rrate.seconds 20 rp.crawl_delay("") 6 rp.can_fetch("", "http://www.musi-cal.com/cgi-bin/search?city=San+Francisco") False rp.can_fetch("", "http://www.musi-cal.com/") True