Common Problems with newspaper3k and How to Overcome Them
By hientd, at: 2023年9月17日22:48
Common Problems with newspaper3k
and How to Overcome Them
The newspaper3k
package is a powerful tool for extracting and processing news articles from the web. However, users may encounter several issues. Here's a quick guide to common problems and solutions, with code snippets.
1. Incomplete or Incorrect Article Extraction
Problem
newspaper3k
may miss key information like the headline, author, or main text due to varied HTML structures.
Solution
Custom Configuration
import newspaper
from newspaper import Config
config = Config()
config.memoize_articles = False
config.fetch_images = False
config.language = 'en'
article = newspaper.Article('https://example.com/article-url', config=config)
article.download()
article.parse()
print(article.title)
Manual Parsing:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
url = 'https://example.com/article-url'
response = requests.get(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.content, 'html.parser')
title = soup.find('h1').text
print(title)
2. Handling Dynamic Content
Problem
newspaper3k
might not capture dynamically loaded content.
Solution
Use Selenium: This does not guarantee that we can collect data from the web page
from selenium import webdriver
from newspaper import Article
url = 'https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/trump-biden-rnc-election-2024?mod=hp_lead_pos7'
driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.get(url)
html = driver.page_source
driver.quit()
article = Article(url)
article.set_html(html)
article.parse()
print(article.text)
3. Slow Performance on Large Datasets
Problem
Processing large numbers of articles sequentially can be slow.
Solution
Parallel Processing
import newspaper
from concurrent.futures import ThreadPoolExecutor
def fetch_article(url):
article = newspaper.Article(url)
article.download()
article.parse()
return article
urls = ['https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-assassination-attempt-investigation-continues-new-details/story?id=112020474', 'https://abcnews.go.com/US/rust-armorer-hannah-gutierrez-seeks-new-trial-after/story?id=112012187']
with ThreadPoolExecutor(max_workers=10) as executor:
articles = list(executor.map(fetch_article, urls))
for article in articles:
print(article.title)
4. Limited Language Support
Problem
Limited support for non-English languages.
Solution
Custom Parsers and NLP Models
import newspaper
from newspaper import Config
config = Config()
config.language = 'fr'
article = newspaper.Article('https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/news/story/former-nfl-star-terrell-davis-speaks-wrongful-handcuffing-112021507', config=config)
article.download()
article.parse()
print(article.text)
5. Dependency Issues and Installation Problems
Problem
Dependency conflicts during installation.
Solution
pip install virtualenv
virtualenv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install newspaper3k
Manual Dependency Installation
pip install lxml Pillow pip install newspaper3k
6. Handling Paywalls and Captchas
Problem
Paywalls and Captchas can block scraping.
Solution
- Subscription APIs: Use official APIs for subscribed users.
- Human Intervention: Semi-automated approaches for Captchas. However, this keeps getting worse, ex: https://2captcha.com/
Conclusion
While newspaper3k
is powerful, it has challenges. These code snippets provide solutions to common problems, enhancing the reliability and efficiency of your scraping projects.
You can find more issues in here https://github.com/codelucas/newspaper/issues