PyCraig

Written by Stephen Diehl stephen.m.diehl@gmail.com.

PyCraig is a python library for scraping small amounts of data off of Craigslist.

PyCraig is for personal use only, too many requests to craigslist will get your ip address banned.

All code is released under a MIT license, see LICENSE for details.

Dependencies

PyCraig depends on BeautifulSoup, you can install it with

 pip install BeautifulSoup

It also uses GNU Curl for grabbing web pages. If you are running Linux, BSD, or OS X you probably have this installed.

jellyfish ( https://github.com/sunlightlabs/jellyfish ) is optionally included for doing approximate string matching. It is written in C and is very fast.

To use jellyfish as a local module use:

 cd pycraig/jellyfish
 make

Or install globally with:

 python pycraig/jellyfish/setup.py install

Example

 >>> from pycraig import *

 # Get 3 page of listings for "cars & trucks" for sale "by owner"
 # in the "San Franciso Bay" area
 >>> listings = get_listings(url='sfbay.craigslist.org',
                             cat='cars & trucks - by owner',
                             pages=3)
 
 # Create table with our car listings
 >>> cars = Table()
 >>> extract_rows(listings, cars)
     
 # Show all hondas under $15,000
 >>> for car in cars:
        if car.price < 15000 and 'honda' in car.desc:
            print car.link, car.desc