trafilatura: Web scraping tool for text discovery and retrieval

Description

Trafilatura is a Python package and command-line tool which seamlessly downloads, parses, and scrapes web page data: it can extract metadata, main body text and comments while preserving parts of the text formatting and page structure. The output can be converted to different formats.

Features

• Seamless and parallel online/offline processing:

  • Download and conversion utilities included
  • URLs, HTML files or parsed HTML trees as input

• Robust and efficient extraction:

  • Main text and/or comments
  • Structural elements preserved: paragraphs, titles, lists, quotes, code, line breaks, in-line text formatting
  • Extraction of metadata (title, author, date, site name, categories and tags)

• Several output formats supported:

  • Text (minimal formatting or Markdown)
  • CSV (with metadata, tab-separated values)
  • JSON (with metadata)
  • XML (for metadata and structure) and TEI-XML

• Link discovery and URL lists:

  • Focused crawling and politeness rules
  • Support for sitemaps and ATOM/RSS feeds
  • Efficient and polite processing of URL queues
  • Blacklisting

• Optional language detection on extracted content

Evaluation and alternatives

For more detailed results see the benchmark and evaluation script. To reproduce the tests just clone the repository, install all necessary packages and run the evaluation script with the data provided in the tests directory.

500 documents, 1487 text and 1496 boilerplate segments (2021-06-07)
Python Package	Precision	Recall	Accuracy	F-Score	Diff.
justext 2.2.0 (custom)	0.870	0.584	0.749	0.699	6.1x
newspaper3k 0.2.8	0.921	0.574	0.763	0.708	12.9x
boilerpy3 1.0.2 (article mode)	0.851	0.696	0.788	0.766	4.8x
goose3 3.1.9	0.950	0.644	0.806	0.767	18.8x
baseline (text markup)	0.746	0.804	0.766	0.774	1x
dragnet 2.0.4	0.906	0.689	0.810	0.783	3.1x
readability-lxml 0.8.1	0.917	0.716	0.826	0.804	5.9x
news-please 1.5.21	0.924	0.718	0.830	0.808	60x
trafilatura 0.8.2 (fast)	0.925	0.868	0.899	0.896	3.9x
trafilatura 0.8.2	0.934	0.890	0.914	0.912	8.4x

External evaluations:

• Most efficient open-source library in ScrapingHub's article extraction benchmark as well as in another independant evaluation on the same data.
• Evaluation page in the docs.

Usage and documentation

For more information please refer to the documentation:

• Installation
• Usage: On the command-line, With Python, With R
• Core Python functions
• Python Notebook Trafilatura Overview
• Tutorials

For video tutorials see this Youtube playlist:

• Web scraping how-tos and tutorials

License

Trafilatura is distributed under the GNU General Public License v3.0. If you wish to redistribute this library but feel bounded by the license conditions please try interacting at arms length, multi-licensing with compatible licenses, or contacting me.

See also GPL and free software licensing: What's in it for business?

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please also feel free to file issues on the dedicated page.

Many thanks to the contributors who submitted features and bugfixes!

Context

Author

This effort is part of methods to derive information from web documents in order to build text databases for research (chiefly linguistic analysis and natural language processing). Extracting and pre-processing web texts to the exacting standards of scientific research presents a substantial challenge for those who conduct such research. Web corpus construction involves numerous design decisions, and this software package can help facilitate text data collection and enhance corpus quality.

• Barbaresi, A. Trafilatura: A Web Scraping Library and Command-Line Tool for Text Discovery and Extraction, Proceedings of ACL/IJCNLP 2021: System Demonstrations, 2021, p. 122-131.
• Barbaresi, A. "Generic Web Content Extraction with Open-Source Software", Proceedings of KONVENS 2019, Kaleidoscope Abstracts, 2019.
• Barbaresi, A. "Efficient construction of metadata-enhanced web corpora", Proceedings of the 10th Web as Corpus Workshop (WAC-X), 2016.

@inproceedings{barbaresi-2021-trafilatura,
  title = {{Trafilatura: A Web Scraping Library and Command-Line Tool for Text Discovery and Extraction}},
  author = "Barbaresi, Adrien",
  booktitle = "Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations",
  pages = "122--131",
  publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
  url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-demo.15",
  year = 2021,
}

You can contact me via my contact page or GitHub.

To have a chat about the software feel free to book a 15 min slot for video-conferencing.

Software

Trafilatura: Italian word for wire drawing.

Known uses of the software.