The Perl Toolchain Summit needs more sponsors. If your company depends on Perl, please support this very important event.
 / 
WWW-3172-Crawler-0.001
++
/ WWW::3172::Crawler

NAME

WWW::3172::Crawler - A simple web crawler for CSCI 3172 Assignment 1

VERSION

version 0.001

SYNOPSIS

    use WWW::3172::Crawler;
    my $crawler = WWW::3172::Crawler->new(host => 'http://hashbang.ca', max => 50);
    my $stats = $crawler->crawl;
    # Present the stats however you want

METHODS

new

The constructor takes a mandatory 'host' parameter, which specifies the starting point for the crawler. The 'max' parameter specifies how many pages to visit, defaulting to 200.

Additional settings are:

  • debug - whether to print debugging information

  • ua - a LWP::UserAgent object to use to crawl. This can be used to provide a mock useragent which doesn't connect to the internet for testing.

crawl

Begins crawling at the provided link, collecting statistics as it goes. The robot respects robots.txt. At the end of the crawling run, reports some basic statistics for each page crawled:

  • description meta tag

  • keywords meta tag

  • page size

  • load time

The data is returned as a hash keyed on URL.

Image, video, and audio are also fetched, evaluated for size and speed.

Crawling ends when there are no more URLs in the crawl queue, or the maximum number of pages is reached.

URLs are crawled in order of the number of appearances the crawler has seen. This is somewhat similar to Google's PageRank algorithm, where popularity of a page, as measured by inbound links, is a major factor in a page's ranking in search results.

AVAILABILITY

The latest version of this module is available from the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN). Visit http://www.perl.com/CPAN/ to find a CPAN site near you, or see http://search.cpan.org/dist/WWW-3172-Crawler/.

The development version lives at http://github.com/doherty/WWW-3172-Crawler and may be cloned from git://github.com/doherty/WWW-3172-Crawler.git. Instead of sending patches, please fork this project using the standard git and github infrastructure.

SOURCE

The development version is on github at http://github.com/doherty/WWW-3172-Crawler and may be cloned from git://github.com/doherty/WWW-3172-Crawler.git

BUGS AND LIMITATIONS

No bugs have been reported.

Please report any bugs or feature requests through the web interface at http://rt.cpan.org.

AUTHOR

Mike Doherty <doherty@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is copyright (c) 2011 by Mike Doherty.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.