chandl

A lightweight tool for parsing and downloading 4chan threads.

Features

• A comprehensive API for programmatically analysing 4chan content.
• Concurrent downloading, with parallelism linked to the number of available cores.
• Override the file naming scheme and specify exclusions for thread downloads.
• Filter files by extension or category (e.g. images, videos).

Installation

To install chandl, simply run:

$ pip install chandl

Examples

Download all files in <thread_url>. A new directory will be created, named after the thread if possible, otherwise its raw id:

$ chandl <thread_url>

Download all images and .webm files in <thread_url> to /dev/shm, using 3 download threads per core:

$ chandl -f images,webm -o /dev/shm -p 3 <thread_url>

Download all files in <thread_url>, except abc.jpg and def.jpg to the present working directory, using a custom name format:

$ chandl -e abc.jpg,def.jpg -t . -n "{board} - {file.name}.{file.extension}" <thread_url>

Usage

$ chandl -h
usage: chandl [-h] [-V] [-v] [-f [FILTER]] [-e [EXCLUDE]] [-o [OUTPUT_DIR]]
              [-t [THREAD_DIR]] [-n [NAME]] [-p PARALLELISM]
              url

A lightweight tool for parsing and downloading 4chan threads.

positional arguments:
  url                   the URL of the thread to download

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -V, --version         show program's version number and exit
  -v, --verbosity       increase output verbosity
  -f [FILTER], --filter [FILTER]
                        file types or extensions to download, value either
                        comma-separated or option passed multiple times
  -e [EXCLUDE], --exclude [EXCLUDE]
                        file names to exclude, value either comma-separated or
                        option passed multiple times
  -o [OUTPUT_DIR], --output-dir [OUTPUT_DIR]
                        the directory to create the `thread-dir` within
  -t [THREAD_DIR], --thread-dir [THREAD_DIR]
                        relative to the `output-dir`, this will contain
                        downloaded files
  -n [NAME], --name [NAME]
                        the format to use for downloaded file names
  -p PARALLELISM, --parallelism PARALLELISM
                        the maximum number of download threads to use per core

Roadmap

• Implement tracking of threads until they are deleted
• Reach 90% test coverage