Digital Library Services for Democracy

This post is part of a series of posts that provide step-by-step instructions on how to write a simple web scraper using Ruby on morph.io. If you find any problems, let us know in the comments so we can improve these tutorials.

In the last post we started writing our scraper and gathering some data. In this post we’ll expand our scraper to get more of the data we’re after.

So now that you’ve got the title for the first member get the electorate (the place the member is ‘member for’) and party.

Looking at the page source again, you can see this information is in the first and second <dd> elements in the member’s <li>.

<li>
  <p class='title'>
    <a href="http://www.aph.gov.au/Senators_and_Members/Parliamentarian?MPID=WN6">
      The Hon Ian Macfarlane MP
    </a>
  </p>
  <p class='thumbnail'>
    <a href="http://www.aph.gov.au/Senators_and_Members/Parliamentarian?MPID=WN6">
      <img alt="Photo of The Hon Ian Macfarlane MP" src="http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/handbook/allmps/WN6/upload_ref_binary/WN6.JPG" width="80" />
    </a>
  </p>
  <dl>
    <dt>Member for</dt>
    <dd>Groom, Queensland</dd>
    <dt>Party</dt>
    <dd>Liberal Party of Australia</dd>
    <dt>Connect</dt>
    <dd>
      <a class="social mail" href="mailto:Ian.Macfarlane.MP@aph.gov.au"
      target="_blank">Email</a>
    </dd>
  </dl>
</li>

Get the electorate and party by first getting an array of the <dd> elements and then selecting the one you want by its index in the array. Remember that [0] is the first item in an Array.

Try getting the data in your irb session:

>> page.at('.search-filter-results').at('li').search('dd')[0].inner_text
=> "Groom, Queensland"
>> page.at('.search-filter-results').at('li').search('dd')[1].inner_text
=> "Liberal Party of Australia"

Then add the code to expand your member object in your scraper.rb:

member = {
  title: page.at('.search-filter-results').at('li').at('.title').inner_text.strip,
  electorate: page.at('.search-filter-results').at('li').search('dd')[0].inner_text,
  party: page.at('.search-filter-results').at('li').search('dd')[1].inner_text
}

Save and run your scraper using bundle exec ruby scraper.rb and check that your object includes the attributes with values you expect.

OK, now you just need the url for the member’s individual page. Look at that source code again and you’ll find it in the href of the <a> inside the <p> with the class title.

In your irb session, first get the <a> element:

>> page.at('.search-filter-results').at('li').at('.title a')
=> #<Nokogiri::XML::Element:0x3fca485cfba0 name="a" attributes=[#<Nokogiri::XML::Attr:0x3fca48432a18 name="href" value="http://www.aph.gov.au/Senators_and_Members/Parliamentarian?MPID=WN6">] children=[#<Nokogiri::XML::Text:0x3fca4843b5c8 "The Hon Ian Macfarlane MP">]>

You get a Nokogiri XML Element with one attribute. The attribute has the name “href” and the value is the url you want. You can use the attr() method here to return this value:

>> page.at('.search-filter-results').at('li').at('.title a').attr('href')
=> "http://www.aph.gov.au/Senators_and_Members/Parliamentarian?MPID=WN6"

You can now add this final attribute to your member object in scraper.rb:

member = {
  title: page.at('.search-filter-results').at('li').at('.title').inner_text.strip,
  electorate: page.at('.search-filter-results').at('li').search('dd')[0].inner_text,
  party: page.at('.search-filter-results').at('li').search('dd')[1].inner_text,
  url: page.at('.search-filter-results').at('li').at('.title a').attr('href')
}

Save and run your scraper file to make sure all is well. This is a good time to do another git commit to save your progress.

Now you’ve written a scraper to get information about one member of Australian Parliament. It’s time to get information about all the members on the first page.

Currently you’re using page.at('.search-filter-results').at('li') to target the first list item in the members list. You can adapt this to get every list item using the search() method:

page.at('.search-filter-results').search('li')

Use a ruby each loop to run your code to collect and print your member object once for each list item.

page.at('.search-filter-results').search('li').each do |li|
  member = {
    title: li.at('.title').inner_text.strip,
    electorate: li.search('dd')[0].inner_text,
    party: li.search('dd')[1].inner_text,
    url: li.at('.title a').attr('href')
  }

  p member
end

Save and run the file and see if it collects all the members on the page as expected. Now you’re really scraping!

You still don’t have all the members though, they are split over 3 pages and you only have the first. In our next post we’ll work out how to deal with this pagination.

This post is part of a series of posts that provide step-by-step instructions on how to write a simple web scraper using Ruby on morph.io. If you find any problems, let us know in the comments so we can improve these tutorials.

In the past post we set up our scraper. Now we’re going to start out writing our scraper.

It can be really helpful to start out writing your scraper in an interactive shell. In the shell you’ll get quick feedback as you explore the page you’re trying to scrape, instead of having to run your scraper file to see what your code does.

The interactive shell for ruby is called irb. Start an irb session on the command line with:

> bundle exec irb

The bundle exec command executes your irb command in the context of your project’s Gemfile. This means that your specified gems will be available.

The first command you need to run in irb is:

>> require 'mechanize'

This loads in the Mechanize library. Mechanize is a helpful library for making requesting and interacting with webpages.

Now you can create an instance of Mechanize that will be your agent to do things like ‘get’ pages and ‘click’ on links:

>> agent = Mechanize.new

You want to get information for all the members you can. Looking at your target page it turns out the members are spread across several pages. You’ll have to scrape all 3 pages to get all the members. Rather than worry about this now, lets start small. Start by just collecting the information you want for the first member on the first page. Reducing the complexity as you start to write your code will make it easier to debug as you go along.

In your irb session, use the Mechanize get method to get the first page with members listed on it.

>> url = "https://morph.io/documentation/examples/australian_members_of_parliament"
>> page = agent.get(url)

This returns the source of your page as a Mechanize Page object. You’ll be pulling the information you want out of this object using the handy Nokogiri XML searching methods that Mechanize loads in for you.

Let’s review some of these methods.

at()

The at() method returns the first element that matches the selectors provided. For example, page.at(‘ul’) returns the first <ul> element in the page as a Nokogiri XML Element that you can parse. There are a number of ways to target elements using the at() method. We’re using a css style selector in this example because many people are familiar with this style from writing CSS or jQuery. You can also target elements by class, e.g. page.at('.search-filter-results'); or id, e.g. page.at('#content').

search()

The search() method works like the at() method, but returns an Array of every element that matches the target instead of just the first. Running page.search('li') returns an Array of every <li> element in page.

You can chain these methods together to find specific elements. page.at('.search-filter-results').at('li').search('p') will return an Array of all <p> elements found within the first <li> element found within the first element with the class .search-filter-results on the page.

You can use the at() and search() methods to get the first member list item on the page:

>> page.at('.search-filter-results').at('li')

This returns a big blob of code that can be hard to read. You can use the inner_text() method to help work out if got the element you’re looking for: the first member in the list.

>> page.at('.search-filter-results').at('li').inner_text
=> "\n\nThe Hon Ian Macfarlane MP\n\n\n\n\n\nMember for\nGroom,Queensland\nParty\nLiberal Party of Australia\nConnect\n\nEmail\n\n\n"

Victory!

Now that you’ve found your first member, you want to collect their title, electorate, party, and the url for their individual page. Let’s start with the title.

If you view the page source in your browser and look at the first member list item, you can see that the title of the member, “The Hon Ian Macfarlane MP”, is the text inside the link in the <p> with the class ‘title’.

<li>
  <p class='title'>
    <a href="http://www.aph.gov.au/Senators_and_Members/Parliamentarian?MPID=WN6">
      The Hon Ian Macfarlane MP
    </a>
  </p>
  <p class='thumbnail'>
    <a href="http://www.aph.gov.au/Senators_and_Members/Parliamentarian?MPID=WN6">
      <img alt="Photo of The Hon Ian Macfarlane MP" src="http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/handbook/allmps/WN6/upload_ref_binary/WN6.JPG" width="80" />
    </a>
  </p>
  <dl>
    <dt>Member for</dt>
    <dd>Groom, Queensland</dd>
    <dt>Party</dt>
    <dd>Liberal Party of Australia</dd>
    <dt>Connect</dt>
    <dd>
      <a class="social mail" href="mailto:Ian.Macfarlane.MP@aph.gov.au"
      target="_blank">Email</a>
    </dd>
  </dl>
</li>

You can use the .inner_text method here.

>> page.at('.search-filter-results').at('li').at('.title').inner_text
=> "\nThe Hon Ian Macfarlane MP\n"

There it is: the title of the first member. It’s got messy \n whitespace characters around it though. Never fear, you can clean it up with the Ruby method strip.

>> page.at('.search-filter-results').at('li').at('.title').inner_text.strip
=> "The Hon Ian Macfarlane MP"

You’ve successfully scraped the first bit of information you want.

Now that you’ve got some code for your scraper, let’s add it to your scraper.rb file and make your first commit.

You’ll want to come back to your irb session, so leave it running and open your scraper.rb file in your code editor. Replace the commented out template code with the working code from your irb session.

Your scraper.rb should look like this:

require 'mechanize'

agent = Mechanize.new
url = 'https://morph.io/documentation/examples/australian_members_of_parliament'
page = agent.get(url)

page.at('.search-filter-results').at('li').at('.title').inner_text.strip

You actually want to collect members with this scraper, so create a member object and assign the text you’ve collected as it’s title:

require 'mechanize'

agent = Mechanize.new
url = 'https://morph.io/documentation/examples/australian_members_of_parliament'
page = agent.get(url)

member = {
  title: page.at('.search-filter-results').at('li').at('.title').inner_text.strip
}

Add a final line to the file to help confirm that everything is working as expected.

p member

You can now, back in on the command line in the folder for your project, run this file in Ruby:

> bundle exec ruby scraper.rb

The scraper runs and the p command returns your member:

> bundle exec ruby scraper.rb
{:title=>"The Hon Ian Macfarlane MP"}

This is a good time to make your first git commit for this project. Yay!

In our next post we’ll work out how to scrape more bits of information from the page.

This post is part of a series of posts that provide step-by-step instructions on how to write a simple web scraper using Ruby on morph.io. If you find any problems, let us know in the comments so we can improve these tutorials.

With just a few lines of code, you can write a scraper to collect data from messy web pages and save it in a structured format you can work with.

This tutorial will take you through the process of writing a simple scraper. This tutorial uses the Ruby programming language, but you can apply the steps and techniques to any language available on morph.io.

Over this tutorial you will:

• create a scraper on morph.io
• clone it using git to work with on your local machine
• make sure you have the necessary dependencies installed
• write scraping code to collect information from a website
• publish and run your scraper on morph.io

In this first instalment you’ll create a scraper, clone it to your machine, and install

You’ll use morph.io, the command line and a code editor on your local machine.

Let’s get started.

Find the data you want to scrape

In this tutorial you’re going to write a simple scraper to collect information about the elected members of Australia’s Federal Parliament. For each member let’s capture their title, electorate, party, and the url for their individual page on the Parliament’s website.

The data you want to scrape needs to be available on the web. We’ve copied a basic list of members from the Parliament’s website to https://morph.io/documentation/examples/australian_members_of_parliament for practice scraping. You will target this page to get the member information with your scraper.

The simplified list of Australian MPs for you to scrape on morph.io

Some web pages are much harder to scrape than others. The member information you’re trying to collect is published in a simple HTML list, which means you should be able to target and collect the information you want quite easily. If the information was in an image or PDF then it would be much harder to access programmatically and therefore much harder to write a scraper for.

Now that you’ve found the data you want to scrape and you know you can scrape it, the next step is to set up your scraper.

Create your scraper on morph.io and clone it to your machine

The easiest way to get started is to create a new scraper on morph.io.

Select the language you want to write your scraper in. This tutorial uses Ruby, so let’s go with that.

Fill out the new scraper form

If you are a member of organisations on GitHub, you can set the owner of your scraper to be either your own account or one of your organisations.

Choose a name and description for your scraper. Use keywords that will help you and others find this scraper on morph.io in the future. Let’s call this scraper “tutorial_members_of_australian_parliament” and describe it as “Collects members of Australia’s Federal Parliament (tutorial)”.

Click “Create Scraper”!

After morph.io has finished creating the new scraper you are taken to your fresh scraper page. You want to clone all the template scraper code morph.io provides to your local machine so you can work with it there.

On the scraper page there is a heading “Scraper code”, with a button to copy the “git clone URL”. This is the link to the GitHub repository of your scraper’s code. Click the button to copy the link to your clipboard.

Commands you’ll need to enter to clone your repository

Open your computer’s command line and cd to the directory you want to work in. Type git clone then paste in the url you copied to get something like:

git clone https://github.com/username/tutorial_members_of_australian_parliament.git

This command pulls down the code from GitHub and adds it to a new directory called nsw_parliament_current_session_bills. Change to that directory with cd tutorial_members_of_australian_parliament and then list the files with ls -al. You should see a bunch of files including:

• scraper.rb, the file that morph.io runs and that you’ll write your scraping code in
• Gemfile, which defines the dependencies you’ll need to run your scraper.

Now that you have the template scraper on your local machine, you need to make sure you have the necessary software installed to run it.

Installing Ruby

Installing Ruby is out of the scope of this tutorial but there are lots of good guides on the web. You might like to use something like RailsInstaller that takes care of this for you. Tools like rbenv or rvm can also be helpful for installing and switching Ruby versions on your computer.

Install the required libraries

In the Gemfile, you’ll see a Ruby version and two libraries specified:

ruby "2.0.0"

gem "scraperwiki", git: "https://github.com/openaustralia/scraperwiki-ruby.git", branch: "morph_defaults"
gem "mechanize"

This is template code that helps you get started by defining some basic dependencies for your scraper. You can read more about language versions and libraries in the morph.io documentation.

You can use Bundler to manage a Ruby project’s dependencies. Run, bundle install on the command line to check the Gemfile and install any libraries (called gems in Ruby) that are required.

So far you’ve set up all your files, cloned them to your machine, and installed the necessary dependencies. In our next post it’ll be time to write your scraper!