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Python Web Scraping
book

Python Web Scraping

by Richard Penman
October 2015
Beginner to intermediate
174 pages
3h 32m
English
Packt Publishing
Content preview from Python Web Scraping

Disk cache

To cache downloads, we will first try the obvious solution and save web pages to the filesystem. To do this, we will need a way to map URLs to a safe cross-platform filename. The following table lists the limitations for some popular filesystems:

Operating system

File system

Invalid filename characters

Maximum filename length

Linux

Ext3/Ext4

/ and \0

255 bytes

OS X

HFS Plus

: and \0

255 UTF-16 code units

Windows

NTFS

\, /, ?, :, *, ", >, <, and |

255 characters

To keep our file path safe across these filesystems, it needs to be restricted to numbers, letters, basic punctuation, and replace all other characters with an underscore, as shown in the following code:

>>> import re >>> url = 'http://example.webscraping.com/default/view/Australia-1' ...
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781782164364