A 'robots.txt' Parser and 'Webbot'/'Spider'/'Crawler' Permissions Checker

Status

lines of R code: 598, lines of test code: 1216

Development version

0.5.0 - 2017-11-11 / 22:01:12

Description

Provides functions to download and parse 'robots.txt' files. Ultimately the package makes it easy to check if bots (spiders, crawler, scrapers, ...) are allowed to access specific resources on a domain.

License

MIT + file LICENSE Peter Meissner [aut, cre], Oliver Keys [ctb], Rich Fitz John [ctb]

Citation

citation("robotstxt")

BibTex for citing

toBibtex(citation("robotstxt"))

Contribution - AKA The-Think-Twice-Be-Nice-Rule

Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms:

As contributors and maintainers of this project, we pledge to respect all people who contribute through reporting issues, posting feature requests, updating documentation, submitting pull requests or patches, and other activities.

We are committed to making participation in this project a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of level of experience, gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, or religion.

Examples of unacceptable behavior by participants include the use of sexual language or imagery, derogatory comments or personal attacks, trolling, public or private harassment, insults, or other unprofessional conduct.

Project maintainers have the right and responsibility to remove, edit, or reject comments, commits, code, wiki edits, issues, and other contributions that are not aligned to this Code of Conduct. Project maintainers who do not follow the Code of Conduct may be removed from the project team.

Instances of abusive, harassing, or otherwise unacceptable behavior may be reported by opening an issue or contacting one or more of the project maintainers.

This Code of Conduct is adapted from the Contributor Covenant (http://contributor-covenant.org), version 1.0.0, available at http://contributor-covenant.org/version/1/0/0/

Installation

Installation and start - stable version

install.packages("robotstxt")
library(robotstxt)

Installation and start - development version

devtools::install_github("ropenscilabs/robotstxt")
library(robotstxt)

Usage

Robotstxt class documentation

?robotstxt

Simple path access right checking ...

library(robotstxt)

paths_allowed(
  paths  = c("/api/rest_v1/?doc", "/w/"), 
  domain = "wikipedia.org", 
  bot    = "*"
)
## 
 wikipedia.org
## [1]  TRUE FALSE

paths_allowed(
  paths = c(
    "https://wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/?doc", 
    "https://wikipedia.org/w/"
  )
)
## 
 wikipedia.org                      
 wikipedia.org
## [1]  TRUE FALSE

... or use it that way ...

library(robotstxt)

rtxt <- robotstxt(domain = "wikipedia.org")
rtxt$check(paths = c("/api/rest_v1/?doc", "/w/"), bot= "*")
## /api/rest_v1/?doc               /w/ 
##              TRUE             FALSE

More information

Have a look at the vignette at https://cran.r-project.org/package=robotstxt/vignettes/using_robotstxt.html