trafilatura: Web scraping tool for text discovery and retrieval#

Description#

Trafilatura is a Python software package and command-line tool which seamlessly downloads, parses, and scrapes web page data: it can extract text & metadata while preserving parts of text formatting and page structure. This light-weight package does not get in your way but acts as a modular toolkit: no database is required, the output can be converted to different commonly used formats.

Distinguishing between a whole page and the page’s essential parts can help to alleviate many quality problems related to web text processing, by dealing with the noise caused by recurring elements (headers and footers, ads, links/blogroll, etc.).

The extractor aims to be precise enough in order not to miss texts or discard valid documents. In addition, it must be robust and reasonably fast. With these objectives in mind, it is designed to run in production on millions of web documents. It is based on lxml and on generic algorithms used as fallback (jusText and a fork of readability-lxml).

The intended audience encompasses disciplines where collecting web pages represents an important step for data collection, notably linguistics, natural language processing and social sciences. In general, it is relevant for anyone interested in gathering texts from the Web, e.g. web crawling and scraping-intensive fields like information security and search engine optimization.

Features#

Seamless and parallel online/offline processing:
- Download and conversion utilities included
- URLs, HTML files or parsed HTML trees as input
Robust and efficient extraction:
- Main text and/or comments
- Structural elements preserved: paragraphs, titles, lists, quotes, code, line breaks, in-line text formatting
- Extraction of metadata (title, author, date, site name, categories and tags)
Several output formats supported:
- Text (minimal formatting or Markdown)
- CSV (with metadata, tab-separated values)
- JSON (with metadata)
- XML (for metadata and structure) and TEI-XML
Link discovery and URL lists:
- Focused crawling and politeness rules
- Support for sitemaps (TXT, XML) and feeds (ATOM, JSON, RSS)
- Efficient and polite processing of URL queues
- Blacklisting
Optional add-ons:
- Language detection on extracted content
- Graphical user interface (GUI)

Evaluation and alternatives#

For more detailed results see the benchmark and evaluation script. To reproduce the tests just clone the repository, install all necessary packages and run the evaluation script with the data provided in the tests directory.

500 documents, 1487 text and 1496 boilerplate segments (2021-06-07)
Python Package	Precision	Recall	Accuracy	F-Score	Diff.
justext 2.2.0 (custom)	0.870	0.584	0.749	0.699	6.1x
newspaper3k 0.2.8	0.921	0.574	0.763	0.708	12.9x
boilerpy3 1.0.2 (article mode)	0.851	0.696	0.788	0.766	4.8x
goose3 3.1.9	0.950	0.644	0.806	0.767	18.8x
baseline (text markup)	0.746	0.804	0.766	0.774	1x
dragnet 2.0.4	0.906	0.689	0.810	0.783	3.1x
readability-lxml 0.8.1	0.917	0.716	0.826	0.804	5.9x
news-please 1.5.21	0.924	0.718	0.830	0.808	60x
trafilatura 0.8.2 (fast)	0.925	0.868	0.899	0.896	3.9x
trafilatura 0.8.2	0.934	0.890	0.914	0.912	8.4x

Other evaluations:#

Most efficient open-source library in ScrapingHub’s article extraction benchmark
Best overall tool according to Gaël Lejeune & Adrien Barbaresi, Bien choisir son outil d’extraction de contenu à partir du Web (2020, PDF, French)

In a nutshell#

Primary installation method is with a Python package manager: pip install trafilatura. See installation documentation.

With Python:

>>> import trafilatura
>>> downloaded = trafilatura.fetch_url('https://github.blog/2019-03-29-leader-spotlight-erin-spiceland/')
>>> trafilatura.extract(downloaded)
# outputs main content and comments as plain text ...

On the command-line:

$ trafilatura -u "https://github.blog/2019-03-29-leader-spotlight-erin-spiceland/"
# outputs main content and comments as plain text ...

For more information please refer to usage documentation and tutorials.

License#

Trafilatura is distributed under the GNU General Public License v3.0. If you wish to redistribute this library but feel bounded by the license conditions please try interacting at arms length, multi-licensing with compatible licenses, or contacting me.

Context#

These documentation pages also provides information on concepts behind data collection as well as practical tips on how to gather web texts (see tutorials).

Contributing#

Contributions are welcome! See CONTRIBUTING.md for more information. Bug reports can be filed on the dedicated page.

Many thanks to the contributors who submitted features and bugfixes!

Roadmap#

For planned enhancements and relevant milestones see issues page.

Author#

This effort is part of methods to derive information from web documents in order to build text databases for research (chiefly linguistic analysis and natural language processing). Extracting and pre-processing web texts to the exacting standards of scientific research presents a substantial challenge for those who conduct such research. Web corpus construction involves numerous design decisions, and this software package can help facilitate text data collection and enhance corpus quality.

Barbaresi, A. Trafilatura: A Web Scraping Library and Command-Line Tool for Text Discovery and Extraction, Proceedings of ACL/IJCNLP 2021: System Demonstrations, 2021, p. 122-131.
Barbaresi, A. “Generic Web Content Extraction with Open-Source Software”, Proceedings of KONVENS 2019, Kaleidoscope Abstracts, 2019.
Barbaresi, A. “Efficient construction of metadata-enhanced web corpora”, Proceedings of the 10th Web as Corpus Workshop (WAC-X), 2016.

@inproceedings{barbaresi-2021-trafilatura,
  title = {{Trafilatura: A Web Scraping Library and Command-Line Tool for Text Discovery and Extraction}},
  author = "Barbaresi, Adrien",
  booktitle = "Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations",
  pages = "122--131",
  publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
  url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-demo.15",
  year = 2021,
}

You can contact me via my contact page or GitHub.

Software#

Trafilatura: Italian word for wire drawing.

Known uses of the software.

Corresponding posts on Bits of Language (blog).