{"id":2657,"date":"2010-12-30T14:01:07","date_gmt":"2010-12-30T14:01:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/osmeusapontamentos.com\/?p=2657"},"modified":"2010-12-30T14:01:07","modified_gmt":"2010-12-30T14:01:07","slug":"scraping-parlamento-pt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/osmeusapontamentos.com\/index.php\/2010\/12\/30\/scraping-parlamento-pt\/","title":{"rendered":"Scraping parlamento.pt"},"content":{"rendered":"

Because scraping<\/a> is the boring part of exploring data I tried to find the easiest, less time-consuming, yet easy to maintain set of tools to do it.
\nSince the URLs are (somewhat) well known, I was able to skip the crawler, url discovery part of this projects, I just curl(ed) the page that I wanted and then parsed it to get the information I needed.<\/p>\n

Fortunately the parlamento.pt<\/a> site is built in such a way that I don’t have to do the usual regexp or string manipulation magic to get what I want, as all the elements of the page have a unique id that i can reference. I just used a simple xpath expression and I have what I need.<\/p>\n

At this point I had the information I needed. All I had to do was save it somewhere. My early experiments were using the\u00a0traditional\u00a0relational database approach (in this case a MySQL database) that I work with everyday. This is not only tedious but also a very closed approach because all I get is another silo with information (a.k.a. table) … if I want to make it available to users i either have to create database users, make some database interface or API for others to use, or go the data dump<\/a> road.<\/p>\n

But neverthless it stayed that way a couple of months until I tried couchdb<\/a>.
\nThis happened during the hackathon<\/a>. I went to Lisbon to get to know other folks that seemed interested in this opendata thing and these guys (bpedro<\/a>, ruidlopes<\/a>, jneves<\/a> and others, sorry didn’t get your name) were really into couchdb so I decided to give a try.<\/p>\n

And I think it’s the best solution so far. What i really like is the “field” creation as you go kind of thing, revisions and specially the json output that you get for free. I think it’s really appropriate for what I’m doing… (to be continued)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Because scraping is the boring part of exploring data I tried to find the easiest, less time-consuming, yet easy to maintain set of tools to do it. Since the URLs are (somewhat) well known, I was able to skip the crawler, url discovery part of this projects, I just curl(ed) the page that I wanted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[181,290,467,592,644],"class_list":["post-2657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ler-ver-ouvir-passear","tag-dados-publicos","tag-hacklaviva","tag-open-data","tag-scraping","tag-transparencia"],"yoast_head":"\nScraping parlamento.pt - Os Meus Apontamentos<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/osmeusapontamentos.com\/index.php\/2010\/12\/30\/scraping-parlamento-pt\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"pt_PT\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Scraping parlamento.pt - Os Meus Apontamentos\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Because scraping is the boring part of exploring data I tried to find the easiest, less time-consuming, yet easy to maintain set of tools to do it. 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