HappyCowler

HappyCowler is a crawler and parser for extracting geospatial data from HappyCow.net, liberating vegans and vegetarians from the pain of having to access the Internet while looking for a restaurant. The script crawls the descriptions and coordinates from the website, and generates a GPX or KML file with the extracted information. Currently, the GPX file is tuned for Osmand.

The primary reason for creating this crawler is that HappyCow is impossible to use on a smartphone. While an official app is available, it requires the presence of proprietary applications such as Google Play. Furthermore, a payment is also required. Thus it is not possible to obtain the app without sacrificing your privacy. By crawling the database, we obtain an offline file that can be used with a GPS app of your choice, without having to access the net while on the go.

Dependencies

The script works with both Python 2 and 3. It relies on BeautifulSoup4 for HTML parsing.

Usage

On the command line, the script takes two parameters. The first is a URL for the results page of a city. The second is the name of the GPX or KML file. For example:

$ happycowl http://www.happycow.net/asia/japan/tokyo/ Tokyo_Restaurants.gpx

The type of the file is determined by the extension of the filename. Once scraping is finished, copy the file to your phone where your GPS app can find it. For instance, in Osmand, the contents of the folder osmand/tracks can easily be put on the map.

You can also use it as a module. In this case, instantiate the class HappyCow(city_url, target_file=None, verbose=0). Then you can start crawling by calling the crawl() method of the class.

Installation

The code is available on PyPI, hence it can be installed by

$ pip install happycowler

For the development version, clone it from git and follow the standard procedure for installing Python modules from source:

$ python setup.py install

Disclaimer

It is conceivable that crawling HappyCow is illegal.