#Best language for webscraper install#
#Best language for webscraper code#

3 seconds is just for the purposes of testing - hours=12 and minutes=10 with different integer values are also accepted parameters. The first line adds a job for the scheduler to run the main() function on an 'interval' of seconds=3. For the main function, after the return, we add these two lines of code: sch.add_job(main, 'interval', seconds=3) print('Press Ctrl+ to exit'.format('Break' if os.name = 'nt' else 'C')) This is where BlockingScheduler and our sch variable comes in handy. The last thing to do is set an interval for it to run on.

#Best language for webscraper code#

We are ready to start setting up our scraper! This is what the code looks like so far:

The last line lets us access the apscheduler module through the sch variable. datetime lets us access the current time and date during script execution. apscheduler is what allows us to run the script at an interval of, say, every 24 hours for daily updates. We use BeautifulSoup to pull information from the HTML page we want to scrape. # scrape.py from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup from import BlockingScheduler from datetime import datetime sch = BlockingScheduler() Next we are going to import the pip packages we installed as well as one called datetime that comes with Python. This is useful because it does things like automatically adding query strings to URLs and adding parameters. The second module import, requests, is an Apache2 Licensed HTTP library that lets us access all the HTTP verbs. This gives our Python script the ability to interact with the operating system it is being run on - because the script is AppleScript, it will have to interact with OS X. Open these in your favorite text editor and let’s get started! We will start with the python file first and we need to import some things. Then we are going to create the two files you need. Run these in terminal in the directory in which you want to create your two scripts.

#Best language for webscraper install#

pip install beautifulsoup pip install apscheduler pip comes installed with Python but if you need to install it, go here. If you do not have Python installed I suggest you go here. There is a link to the Github repository of the project at the bottom of the page. Here is a quick tutorial on how I created my scraper. I learned a lot, but most importantly I got out of my comfort zone.

I had no idea how I was going to run an AppleScript file inside a Python file - I didn’t even know Python! Yet I am proud to say I was able to get it working - by hacking away, googling, using pip, and reading documentation. Why not write a web scraper that would send me a text message when a specific substring appeared in the title of a job posting on Indeed? I did not know how frequently the words ‘Junior’ or ‘Jr’ appeared in developer job titles, so I thought it would be an interesting thing to try out.

Then, taking a break and browsing jobs on, I had an idea. I started out trying to scrape Reddit for Avengers Endgame spoilers. I decided to investigate scraping, try it out myself, and maybe learn some Python along the way. Then, a week or so later, I had an interesting conversation with an Instructor at FlatIron (where I am a student) about how he had built a web scraper to check the prices of trucks as he was planning to buy one. I was interested in how he wrote it and glanced at his code, but then forgot about it. A friend wrote a script to spam me texts through iMessage. I was introduced to AppleScripts through a practical joke. Because sometimes you have got to step your game up to get hiredįirst, let me give you some context as to how this little Python/AppleScript duo came to be.