Lang8 Crawler

Overview

Lang8 Crawler written in Python is based on scrapy, a fast high-level web crawling and web scraping framework. For more information about scrapy, check the homepage at: http://scrapy.org/

The following features included

• Tor and Polipo support to create anonymous crawler and avoid being banned
• Crawl each journal for each user on Lang8 and corresponding correct/incorrect pairs
• Unicode support
• Output JSON format

Requirements

• Python 2.7
• Works on Linux, Windows, Mac OSX, BSD
• Tor (optional feature)
• Polipo (optional feature)

Installation

You can disable Tor and Polipo support in settings.py to skip step 3 and 4

• Install Python 2.7
• Install Scrapy
• Install Tor
• Install Polipo and edit polipo config file as follows

socksParentProxy = localhost:9050
diskCacheRoot=""
disableLocalInterface=""

• Run polipo via polipo -c CONFIG_FILE daemonise=true logFile=LOG_FILE
• change directory to lang8-crawler/lang8 and run Lang8 Crawler via scrapy crawl lang8

Configuration

• Modify the lang8-crawler/lang8/lang8/settings.py to config scrapy. Check the self-explainable comments in settings.py