Crawtext is a project of the Cortext Lab. It is independant from the Cortext manager plateform but deisgned to interact with it. Get a free account and discover the tools you can use for your own research by registering at

Crawtext is a tiny crawler in command line that let you investigate and collect the ressources of the web that match the special keywords. Usefull for archiving the web around a special theme, results could also be used with the cortext manager to explore the relationships between websites on a special topic.

Crawtext is a tiny crawler that goes from page to page colecting relevant article given a few keywords

The crawler needs:

• a query to select pertinent pages and
• starting urls to collect data

Given a list of url

1. the robot will collect the article for each url
2. It will search for the keywords inside the text extracted from the article. => If the keywords are present in the page it stores the content of the page and
3. The links inside the page will be added to the next lists to be treated

• First, you must have MongoDB installed:

• For Debian distribution

	$ sudo apt-get install mongodb

• For OSX distribution install it with brew:

$ brew install mongodb

• Then create a virtualenvironnement (recommended)

	$mkvirtualenv crawtext_env
	(crawtext_env)$

• Clone the sources files with git and enter in it

	(crawtext_env)$ git clone https://github.com/cortext/crawtext
	(crawtext_env)$ cd crawtext

• Install requirements throught pip

	(crawtext_env)$pip install -r requirements.pip

That's all folk you know have a complete crawler working!

1. Enter in the project directory

	$cd crawtext

2. Create a new project

A project need to be configure with 3 basic requirements:

• a name: the name of your project

e.g: pesticides

• a query: search query or expression that have to be found in web pages. The query expression supports simple logical operator : (AND, OR, NOT) and semantic operator: ("", *)

e.g: pesticides AND DDT

• one or multiple url to start crawl: You have three options to add starting urls to your project: ** specifiying one url ** giving a text file where urls are stored line by line

e.g: examples/seeds.txt

** 50 urls given by the search result in BING search engine providing the acess key to Bing Search API:

See how to get your

e.g: XVDVYU53456FDZ

Here as an example: it create a new project called pesticides with the 50 urls given by BING results search

	$ python crawtext.py pesticides --query="pesticides AND ddt" --key=XVDVYU53456

Once the script has check the starting urls a few informations on the project will be displayed.

If everything is ok, lauch the crawl:

	$ python crawtext.py pesticides start

See how is your crawl going using the report option:

$python crawtext.py pesticides report

Report will be stored in the dedicated file of your project

$cd projects/pesticides/report

If you prefere to receive and email add your email to project configuration:

$python crawtext.py pesticides add --user=me@mailbox.net
$python crawtext.py pesticides report

Export the results of crawl

$python crawtext.py pesticides export

Results, logs and sources will be stored in the dedicated file of your project

$cd projects/pesticides

Defaut export format is json. If you want an export in csv :

$python crawtext.py pesticides export --format=csv

Crawtext gives you some facilities to modify delete add more parameters

• Add or modify parameters: You can add or change the following parameters:
  • user (--user=)
  • file (--file=)
  • url (--url=)
  • query (--query=)
  • key (--key=)
  • depth (--depth=)
  • format (--format=)

using the following syntax:

$python crawtext.py add --user="new_mail@mailbox.com"
$python crawtext.py add --depth=10

• Remove parameters: You can remove the following parameters:
  • user (-u)
  • file (-f)
  • url (--url=http://example.com)
  • query (-q)
  • key (-k)
  • depth (-d)

using the following syntax:

$python crawtext.py delete -u
$python crawtext.py delete -d

• Stop the crawl:

You can stop the current process of crawl

$python crawtext.py pesticides stop

Next run will start from where it stops

• Delete: You can delete the entire project. Every single datasets will be destroyed so be carefull!

$python crawtext.py pesticides delete

Datasets are stored in json and zip in 3 collections in the dedicated directory of your project:

• results
• sources
• logs

Anatomy of a source entry
-----
Sources of your project correspond a datatable that can export in json or csv
informations that are stored are the following:
Date msg and status are updated for each run of the crawl with the corresponding status msg


{	
	"_id" : ObjectId("546dc48edabe6e52c2e54908"),
	"date" : [
		ISODate("2014-11-20T11:38:06.397Z"),
		ISODate("2014-11-20T11:38:06.424Z")
	],
	"depth" : 2,
	"extension" : "org",
	"file_type" : null,
	"msg" : [
		"Ok",
		"Ok"
	],
	"netloc" : "fr.wikipedia.org",
	"origin" : "bing",
	"path" : "/wiki/Algue_verte",
	"relative" : true,
	"scheme" : "http",
	"source_url" : "http://fr.wikipedia.org",
	"status" : [
		true,
		true
	],
	"tld" : "wikipedia",
	"url" : "http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algue_verte"
	}


Anatomy of a result entry
-----
			{
			 "url":http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algue_verte,
             "url_info":{ 	"origin" : "", 
                 				"status" : [ true ], 
                 				"extension" : "org", 
                 				"url" : "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algue_verte", 
                 				"netloc" : "en.wikipedia.org", 
                 				"source_url" : "http://en.wikipedia.org", 
                 				"relative" : false, 
                 				"file_type" : null, 
                 				"depth" : 2, 
                 				"tld" : "wikipedia", 
                 				"date" : [ { "$date" : 1416293382397 } ], 
                 				"path" : "/wiki/Responsible_Research_and_Innovation", 
                 				"scheme" : "http", 
                 				"msg" : [ "Ok" ] }, 
                 "title": "Algues vertes", 
                 "text":"",
                 "html":"",
                 "links":[http://www.dmu.ac.uk/study/study.aspx", "http://www.dmu.ac.uk/research", "http://www.dmu.ac.uk/international/en/international.aspx", "http://www.dmu.ac.uk/business-services/business-services.aspx", "http://www.dmu.ac.uk/about-dmu/about-dmu.aspx", "#", "/study/undergraduate-study/undergraduate-study.aspx", "/study/postgraduate-study/postgraduate-study.aspx", "/information-for-parents/information-for-parents.aspx", "/information-for-teachers/information-for-teachers.aspx", "/dmu-students/dmu-students.aspx", "/alumni", "/dmu-staff/dmu-staff.aspx", "/international/en/before-you-apply-to-study-at-dmu/your-country/country-information.aspx", "/business-services/access-our-students-and-graduates/access-our-students-and-graduates.aspx", "/about-dmu/news/contact-details.aspx", "/study/undergraduate-study/student-support/advice-and-guidance-for-mature-students/advice-and-guidance-for-mature-students.aspx", "http://www.dmuglobal.com/", "/about-dmu/events/events.aspx"],
                 }

Anatomy of a logs entry
-----
{
	"_id" : ObjectId("546dc72cdabe6e53c004a603"),
	"url" : "http://france3-regions.francetvinfo.fr/bretagne/algues-vertes",
	"status" : false,
	"code" : 500,
	"msg" : "Requests Error: HTTPConnectionPool(host='france3-regions.francetvinfo.fr', port=80): Read timed out. (read timeout=5)"
}

1. Zip the json file you want to analyse
2. Upload it into Cortext Manager
3. Parse it throught using JSON scrip
4. Then Parse the result using cortext script ==> You have now a useful dataset for running script on cortext Ex: Build a map of crossn references:
5. Select the final dataset
6. Select map
7. Choose url and links You will have a pdf that maps the relationship

• Automatic zip at export
• Export of raw html and text
• Put max_depth has a user option (default: 10)
• Enable more than 50 results search from BING API
• Enable Google Search option
• Simple web interface

You can see the code ![here] (https://github.com/cortext/crawtext)

Crawtext is a simple module in command line to crawl the web given a query. This interface offers you a full set of option to set up a project. If you need any help on interacting with the shell command you can just type to see all the options:

python crawtext.py --help

You can also ask for pull request here http://github.com/cortext/crawtext/, we will be happy to answer to any configuration problem or desired features.

• Mongo Database:

Sometimes if you shut your programm by forcing, you could have an error to connect to database such has:

couldn't connect to server 127.0.0.1:27017 at src/mongo/shell/mongo.js:145```



The way to repair it is to remove locks of mongod 

sudo rm /var/lib/mongodb/mongod.lock```

sudo service mongodb restart```


If it doesn't work it means the index is corrupted so you have to repair it:

sudo mongod --repair```

• Article detection: we use the implementation of newspaper based on Goose special thanks to them