Books.ToScrape Scraper

A high-performance, concurrent web scraper for books.toscrape.com built with Python. Features robust error handling, rate limiting, and detailed logging while respecting the website's resources.

Features

• 🚀 Concurrent scraping using ThreadPoolExecutor
• 📊 Automatic CSV export
• 🔄 Smart retry mechanism
• ⏱️ Rate limiting to respect server resources
• 📝 Comprehensive logging
• 🛡️ Robust error handling

Quick Start

Prerequisites

• Python 3.7 or higher
• pip (Python package manager)

Installation

1. Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/yourusername/books-scraper.git
cd books-scraper

2. Create a virtual environment (recommended):

python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate  # On Windows: venv\Scripts\activate

3. Install dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

Basic usage:

python scraper.py

With custom parameters:

python scraper.py --pages 100 --workers 5 --output books.csv

Configuration

Key settings in scraper.py:

MAX_RETRIES = 3        # Maximum retry attempts
TIMEOUT = 10           # Request timeout in seconds
MAX_WORKERS = 5        # Concurrent threads
RATE_LIMIT = 1         # Seconds between requests
OUTPUT_FILE = "books.csv"

Output Format

The scraper saves data in CSV format with the following columns:

Column	Description
title	Book title
price	Price in £
availability	Stock status
rating	Star rating (1-5)
url	Book detail page URL

Advanced Features

Logging

• Detailed logs saved to scraper.log
• Console output for progress tracking
• Error tracking and reporting

Error Handling

• Automatic retry for failed requests
• Rate limit detection and handling
• Malformed HTML protection
• Network error recovery

Performance

• Concurrent page processing
• Connection pooling
• Session reuse
• Optimized memory usage

Development

Project Structure

├── scraper.py         # Main scraper code
├── README.md         # Documentation
└── .gitignore       # Git ignore file

Contributing

1. Fork the repository
2. Create a feature branch
3. Make your changes
4. Run tests
5. Submit a pull request

Dependencies

• requests>=2.26.0
• beautifulsoup4>=4.9.3
• urllib3>=1.26.7

Troubleshooting

Common issues and solutions:

1. Rate limiting:

   • Increase RATE_LIMIT value
   • Reduce MAX_WORKERS

2. Connection errors:

   • Check internet connection
   • Verify website availability
   • Increase TIMEOUT value

Acknowledgments

• Books to Scrape for providing the test website
• BeautifulSoup4 developers for the excellent parsing library
• Python community for the concurrent.futures framework

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Note: This scraper is for educational purposes only. Always check and respect a website's robots.txt and terms of service before scraping.