Alternatives and detailed information of warc

THIS WILL LIKELY BE UNDERGOING MAJOR CHANGES

See: https://github.com/hrbrmstr/jwatr for a new spin on the WARC ecosystem in R

The current thought is to move higher order functions to here (read/write WARC) and expose lower-level stuff via jwatr, but jwatr may also just become warc for a CRAN release.

warc : Tools to Work with the Web Archive Ecosystem

WARC files (and the metadata files that usually follow them) are the de facto method of archiving web content. There are tools in Python & Java to work with this data and there are many "big data" tools that make working with large-scale data from sites like Common Crawl and The Internet Archive very straightforward.

Now there are tools to create and work with the WARC ecosystem in R.

Possible use-cases:

If you need to scrape data from many URLs and would like to make the analyses on that data reproducible but are concerned that the sites may change format or may be offline but also don't want to manage individual HTML (etc) files
Analyzing Common Crawl data (etc) natively in R
Saving the entire state of an httr request (warc can turn httr responses into WARC files and turns WARC response records into httr::response objects)

warc can work with WARC files that are composed of individual gzip streams or on plaintext WARC files and can also read & generate CDX files. Support for more file types (e.g. WET, WAT, etc) are planned.

Since I ended up making some gz file functions for this package, it only seemed appropriate to expose them.

The following functions are implemented:

as_warc: Convert an ‘httr::respone’ object to WARC response objects
create_cdx: Takes as input an optionally compressed WARC file and creates a
create_warc_wget: Newer versions of ‘wget’ are designed to support capturing of or
gz_close: Close the gz file
gz_eof: Test for end of file
gz_flush: This will flush all zlib output buffers for the current file and
gz_fseek: Sets the starting position for the next ‘gz_read()’ or
gz_gets: Read a line from a gz file
gz_gets_raw: Read a line from a gz file
gz_offset: Return the current raw compressed offset in the file
gz_open: Open a gzip file for reading or writing
gz_read_char: Read from a gz file into a character vector
gz_read_raw: Read from a gz file into a raw vector
gz_seek: Sets the starting position for the next ‘gz_read()’ or
gz_tell: Return the current raw uncompressedf offset in the file
gz_write_char: Write an atomic character vector to a file
gz_write_raw: Write a raw vector to a gz file
gzip_inflate_from_pos: Given a gzip file that was built with concatenated individual gzip
read_cdx: CDX files are used to index the content of WARC files.
read_warc_entry: Given the path to a WARC file (compressed or uncompressed) and the
warc_headers: Extract WARC headers from a WARC response object
write_warc_record: Write a WARC record to a file

Installation

You need wget on your system PATH. Folks on real operating systems can do the apt-get, yum install or brew install (et al) dance for your particular system. Version 1.18+ is recommended, but any version with support for WARC extensions should do.

Windows folks will need to grab the statically linked 32-bit or 64-bit binaries from here and put them on your system PATH somewhere if you want to create WARC files in bulk using wget.

devtools::install_git("https://gitlab.com/hrbrmstr/warc.git")

Usage

library(warc)
library(httr)

# current verison
packageVersion("warc")

## [1] '0.1.0'

cdx <- read_cdx(system.file("extdata", "20160901.cdx", package="warc"))

i <- 5

path <- file.path(cdx$warc_path[i], cdx$file_name[i])
start <- cdx$compressed_arc_file_offset[i]

entry <- read_warc_entry(path, start)

print(entry)

## Response [https://r-project.org/]
##   Date: 2016-09-01 18:03
##   Status: 301
##   Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
##   Size: 314 B
## <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
## <html><head>
## <title>301 Moved Permanently</title>
## </head><body>
## <h1>Moved Permanently</h1>
## <p>The document has moved <a href="https://www.r-project.org/">here</a>.</p>
## <hr>
## <address>Apache/2.4.10 (Debian) Server at r-project.org Port 443</address>
## </body></html>

print(warc_headers(entry))

## $`warc-type`
## [1] "response"
## 
## $`warc-record-id`
## [1] "<urn:uuid:9EB1B94E-A929-4B5E-AE10-FB54C2E7308B>"
## 
## $`warc-warcinfo-id`
## [1] "<urn:uuid:7D7DC0CA-8FC7-4FFB-9D5A-4187EB50ED74>"
## 
## $`warc-concurrent-to`
## [1] "<urn:uuid:592019F2-C037-4899-8DB2-CC04266B9E29>"
## 
## $`warc-target-uri`
## [1] "https://r-project.org/"
## 
## $`warc-date`
## [1] "2016-09-01 18:03:46 UTC"
## 
## $`warc-ip-address`
## [1] "137.208.57.37"
## 
## $`warc-block-digest`
## [1] "\020"
## 
## $`warc-payload-digest`
## [1] ":\001"
## 
## $`content-type`
## [1] "application/http;msgtype=response"
## 
## $`content-length`
## [1] 578
## 
## attr(,"class")
## [1] "insensitive" "list"

print(status_code(entry))

## [1] 301

print(http_type(entry))

## [1] "text/html"

Creating + reading

library(warc)
library(purrr)
library(rvest)

warc_dir <- file.path(tempdir(), "rfolks")
dir.create(warc_dir)

urls <- c("http://rud.is/",
          "http://hadley.nz/",
          "http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/",
          "https://jeroenooms.github.io/",
          "https://ironholds.org/")

create_warc_wget(urls, warc_dir, warc_file="rfolks-warc")

cdx <- read_cdx(file.path(warc_dir, "rfolks-warc.cdx"))

sites <- map(1:nrow(cdx),
             ~read_warc_entry(file.path(cdx$warc_path[.],
                                        cdx$file_name[.]), 
                              cdx$compressed_arc_file_offset[.]))

map(sites, ~read_html(content(., as="text", encoding="UTF-8"))) %>% 
  map_chr(~html_text(html_nodes(., "title")))

## [1] "rud.is"              "Hadley Wickham"      "Dirk Eddelbuettel"   "About Jeroen..."     "Oliver Keyes - Home"

unlink(warc_dir)

Test Results

library(warc)
library(testthat)

date()

## [1] "Mon Sep 12 15:27:08 2016"

test_dir("tests/")

## testthat results ========================================================================================================
## OK: 0 SKIPPED: 0 FAILED: 0
## 
## DONE ===================================================================================================================

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hrbrmstr / warc

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