zyte-autoextract

Python client libraries for Zyte Automatic Extraction API. It allows to extract product, article, job posting, etc. information from any website - whatever the API supports.

Command-line utility, asyncio-based library and a simple synchronous wrapper are provided by this package.

License is BSD 3-clause.

Installation

pip install zyte-autoextract

zyte-autoextract requires Python 3.6+ for CLI tool and for the asyncio API; basic, synchronous API works with Python 3.5.

Usage

First, make sure you have an API key. To avoid passing it in api_key argument with every call, you can set ZYTE_AUTOEXTRACT_KEY environment variable with the key.

Command-line interface

The most basic way to use the client is from a command line. First, create a file with urls, an URL per line (e.g. urls.txt). Second, set ZYTE_AUTOEXTRACT_KEY env variable with your Zyte Automatic Extraction API key (you can also pass API key as --api-key script argument).

Then run a script, to get the results:

python -m autoextract urls.txt --page-type article --output res.jl

Note

The results can be stored in an order which is different from the input order. If you need to match the output results to the input URLs, the best way is to use meta field (see below); it is passed through, and returned as-is in row["query"]["userQuery"]["meta"].

If you need more flexibility, you can customize the requests by creating a JsonLines file with queries: a JSON object per line. You can pass any Zyte Automatic Extraction options there. Example - store it in queries.jl file:

{"url": "http://example.com", "meta": "id0", "articleBodyRaw": false}
{"url": "http://example.com/foo", "meta": "id1", "articleBodyRaw": false}
{"url": "http://example.com/bar", "meta": "id2", "articleBodyRaw": false}

See API docs for a description of all supported parameters in these query dicts. API docs mention batch requests and their limitation (no more than 100 queries at time); these limits don't apply to the queries.jl file (i.e. it may have millions of rows), as the command-line script does its own batching.

Note that in the example pageType argument is omitted; pageType values are filled automatically from --page-type command line argument value. You can also set a different pageType for a row in queries.jl file; it has a priority over --page-type passed in cmdline.

To get results for this queries.jl file, run:

python -m autoextract --intype jl queries.jl --page-type article --output res.jl

Processing speed

Each API key has a limit on RPS. To get your URLs processed faster you can tune concurrency options: batch size and a number of connections.

Best options depend on the RPS limit and on websites you're extracting data from. For example, if your API key has a limit of 3RPS, and average response time you observe for your websites is 10s, then to get to these 3RPS you may set e.g. batch size = 2, number of connections = 15 - this would allow to process 30 requests in parallel.

To set these options in the CLI, use --n-conn and --batch-size arguments:

python -m autoextract urls.txt --page-type articles --n-conn 15 --batch-size 2 --output res.jl

If too many requests are being processed in parallel, you'll be getting throttling errors. They are handled by CLI automatically, but they make extraction less efficient; please tune the concurrency options to not hit the throttling errors (HTTP 429) often.

You may be also limited by the website speed. Zyte Automatic Extraction tries not to hit any individual website too hard, but it could be better to limit this on a client side as well. If you're extracting data from a single website, it could make sense to decrease the amount of parallel requests; it can ensure higher success ratio overall.

If you're extracting data from multiple websites, it makes sense to spread the load across time: if you have websites A, B and C, don't send requests in AAAABBBBCCCC order, send them in ABCABCABCABC order instead.

To do so, you can change the order of the queries in your input file. Alternatively, you can pass --shuffle options; it randomly shuffles input queries before sending them to the API:

python -m autoextract urls.txt --shuffle --page-type articles --output res.jl

Run python -m autoextract --help to get description of all supported options.

Errors

The following errors could happen while making requests:

Network errors
Request-level errors
- Authentication failure
- Malformed request
- Too many queries in request
- Request payload size is too large
Query-level errors
- Downloader errors
- Proxy errors
- ...

Some errors can be retried while others can't.

For example, you can retry a query with a Proxy Timeout error because this is a temporary error and there are chances that this response will be different within the next retries.

On the other hand, it makes no sense to retry queries that return a 404 Not Found error because the response is not supposed to change if retried.

Retries

By default, we will automatically retry Network and Request-level errors. You could also enable Query-level errors retries by specifying the --max-query-error-retries argument.

Enable Query-level retries to increase the success rate at the cost of more requests being performed if you are interested in a higher success rate.

python -m autoextract urls.txt --page-type articles --max-query-error-retries 3 --output res.jl

Failing queries are retried until the max number of retries or a timeout is reached. If it's still not possible to fetch all queries without errors, the last available result is written to the output including both queries with success and the ones with errors.

Synchronous API

Synchronous API provides an easy way to try Zyte Automatic Extraction. For production usage asyncio API is strongly recommended. Currently the synchronous API doesn't handle throttling errors, and has other limitations; it is most suited for quickly checking extraction results for a few URLs.

To send a request, use request_raw function; consult with the API docs to understand how to populate the query:

from autoextract.sync import request_raw
query = [{'url': 'http://example.com.foo', 'pageType': 'article'}]
results = request_raw(query)

Note that if there are several URLs in the query, results can be returned in arbitrary order.

There is also a autoextract.sync.request_batch helper, which accepts URLs and page type, and ensures results are in the same order as requested URLs:

from autoextract.sync import request_batch
urls = ['http://example.com/foo', 'http://example.com/bar']
results = request_batch(urls, page_type='article')

Note

Currently request_batch is limited to 100 URLs at time only.

asyncio API

Basic usage is similar to the sync API (request_raw), but asyncio event loop is used:

from autoextract.aio import request_raw

async def foo():
    query = [{'url': 'http://example.com.foo', 'pageType': 'article'}]
    results1 = await request_raw(query)
    # ...

There is also request_parallel_as_completed function, which allows to process many URLs in parallel, using both batching and multiple connections:

import sys
from autoextract.aio import request_parallel_as_completed, create_session
from autoextract import ArticleRequest

async def extract_from(urls):
    requests = [ArticleRequest(url) for url in urls]
    async with create_session() as session:
        res_iter = request_parallel_as_completed(requests,
                                    n_conn=15, batch_size=2,
                                    session=session)
        for fut in res_iter:
            try:
                batch_result = await fut
                for res in batch_result:
                    # do something with a result, e.g.
                    print(json.dumps(res))
            except RequestError as e:
                print(e, file=sys.stderr)
                raise

request_parallel_as_completed is modelled after asyncio.as_completed (see https://docs.python.org/3/library/asyncio-task.html#asyncio.as_completed), and actually uses it under the hood.

Note from autoextract import ArticleRequest and its usage in the example above. There are several Request helper classes, which simplify building of the queries.

request_parallel_as_completed and request_raw functions handle throttling (http 429 errors) and network errors, retrying a request in these cases.

CLI interface implementation (autoextract/__main__.py) can serve as an usage example.

Request helpers

To query Zyte Automatic Extraction you need to create a dict with request parameters, e.g.:

{'url': 'http://example.com.foo', 'pageType': 'article'}

To simplify the library usage and avoid typos, zyte-autoextract provides helper classes for constructing these dicts:

* autoextract.Request
* autoextract.ArticleRequest
* autoextract.ProductRequest
* autoextract.JobPostingRequest

You can pass instances of these classes instead of dicts everywhere when requests dicts are accepted. So e.g. instead of writing this:

query = [{"url": url, "pageType": "article"} for url in urls]

You can write this:

query = [Request(url, pageType="article") for url in urls]

or this:

query = [ArticleRequest(url) for url in urls]

There is one difference: articleBodyRaw parameter is set to False by default when Request or its variants are used, while it is True by default in the API.

You can override API params passing a dictionary with extra data using the extra argument. Note that it will overwrite any previous configuration made using standard attributes like articleBodyRaw and fullHtml.

Extra parameters example:

request = ArticleRequest(
    url=url,
    fullHtml=True,
    extra={
        "customField": "custom value",
        "fullHtml": False
    }
)

This will generate a query that looks like this:

{
    "url": url,
    "pageType": "article",
    "fullHtml": False,  # our extra parameter overrides the previous value
    "customField": "custom value"  # not a default param but defined even then
}