web scraping - Parsing robot.txt using java and identify whether an url is allowed

Question

I am currently using jsoup in a application to parse and analyses web pages.But I want to make sure that I am adhere to the robot.txt rules and only visit pages which are allowed.

I am pretty sure that jsoup is not made for this and it's all about web scraping and parsing. So I planned to have function/module which should read the robot.txt of the domain/site and identify whether the url I am going to visit is allowed or not.

I did some research and found the followings.But it I am not sure about these so it would be great if one did same kind of project where robot.txt parsing involved please share your thoughts and ideas.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/jrobotx/

https://code.google.com/p/crawler-commons/

http://code.google.com/p/crowl/source/browse/trunk/Crow/src/org/crow/base/Robotstxt.java?r=12

Answer 1

A late answer just in case you - or someone else - are still looking for a way to do this. I am using https://code.google.com/p/crawler-commons/ in version 0.2 and it seems to work well. Here is a simplified example from the code I use:

String USER_AGENT = "WhateverBot";
String url = "http://www.....com/";
URL urlObj = new URL(url);
String hostId = urlObj.getProtocol() + "://" + urlObj.getHost()
                + (urlObj.getPort() > -1 ? ":" + urlObj.getPort() : "");
Map<String, BaseRobotRules> robotsTxtRules = new HashMap<String, BaseRobotRules>();
BaseRobotRules rules = robotsTxtRules.get(hostId);
if (rules == null) {
    HttpGet httpget = new HttpGet(hostId + "/robots.txt");
    HttpContext context = new BasicHttpContext();
    HttpResponse response = httpclient.execute(httpget, context);
    if (response.getStatusLine() != null && response.getStatusLine().getStatusCode() == 404) {
        rules = new SimpleRobotRules(RobotRulesMode.ALLOW_ALL);
        // consume entity to deallocate connection
        EntityUtils.consumeQuietly(response.getEntity());
    } else {
        BufferedHttpEntity entity = new BufferedHttpEntity(response.getEntity());
        SimpleRobotRulesParser robotParser = new SimpleRobotRulesParser();
        rules = robotParser.parseContent(hostId, IOUtils.toByteArray(entity.getContent()),
                "text/plain", USER_AGENT);
    }
    robotsTxtRules.put(hostId, rules);
}
boolean urlAllowed = rules.isAllowed(url);

Obviously this is not related to Jsoup in any way, it just checks whether a given URL is allowed to be crawled for a certain USER_AGENT. For fetching the robots.txt I use the Apache HttpClient in version 4.2.1, but this could be replaced by java.net stuff as well.

Please note that this code only checks for allowance or disallowance and does not consider other robots.txt features like "Crawl-delay". But as the crawler-commons provide this feature as well, it can be easily added to the code above.