Happy New Year!
I have just started to learn Julia and my first mini challenge I have set myself is to scrape data from a large list of URLs.
I have ca 50k URLs (which I successfully parsed from a JSON with Julia using Regex) in a CSV file. I want to scrape each one and return a matched string ("/page/12345/view" - where 12345 is any integer).
I managed to do so using HTTP and Queryverse (although had started with CSV and CSVFiles but looking at packages for learning purposes) but the script seems to stop after just under 2k. I can't see an error such as a timeout.
May I ask if anyone can advise what I'm doing wrong or how I can approach it differently? Explanations/links to learning resources would also be great!
using HTTP, Queryverse
URLs = load("urls.csv") |> DataFrame
patternid = r"\/page\/[0-9]+\/view"
touch("ids.txt")
f = open("ids.txt", "a")
for row in eachrow(URLs)
urlResponse = HTTP.get(row[:url])
if Int(urlResponse.status) == 404
continue
end
urlHTML = String(urlResponse.body)
urlIDmatch = match(patternid, urlHTML)
write(f, urlIDmatch.match, "\n")
end
close(f)
There can be always a server that detects your scraper and intentionally takes a very long time to respond.
Basically, since scraping is an IO intensive operations you should do it using a big number of asynchronous tasks. Moreover this should be combined with the readtimeout parameter of the get function. Hence your code will look more or less like this:
asyncmap(1:nrow(URLs);ntasks=50) do n
row = URLs[n, :]
urlResponse = HTTP.get(row[:url], readtimeout=10)
# the rest of your code comes here
end
Even one some servers are delaying transmission, always many connections will be working.
I am trying to calculate a field for all rows of a large dataset. The function to calculate it is from the package taxize, and uses an HTTP request to query an external site for the right ID number. It is searching by scientific name, and often there are multiple results, in which case this function asks for user input. I would like the function to cache my selection and return that ID number every time the same call is made from then on. I have tried with my own caching function and with memoizedCall() from the package R.cache but every time it hits the second entry of the same scientific name it still prompts me for user input. I feel like I am misunderstanding something basic about how vectorization works. Sorry for my ignorance but any advice is appreciated.
Here is the code I used as a custom caching function.
check_tsn <- function(data,tsn_list){
print(data)
print(tsn_list)
if (is.null(tsn_list$data)){
tsn_list$data = taxize::get_tsn(data)
print('added to tsn_list')
}
return(tsn_list$data)
}
tsn_list <- vector(mode = "list", nrow(wanglang))
Genus.Species <- c('Tamiops swinhoei','Bos taurus','Tamiops swinhoei')
IUCN.ID <- c('21382','','21382')
species <- data.frame(Genus.Species,IUCN.ID)
species$TSN.ID = check_tsn(species$Genus.Species,tsn_list)
I am using RStudio 3.4.4 on a windows 10 machine.
I have got a vector of artist names and I am trying to get genre information for them all on spotify. I have successfully set up the API and the RSpotify package is working as expected.
I am trying to build up to create a function but I am failing pretty early on.
So far i have the following but it is returning unexpected results
len <- nrow(Artist_Nam)
artist_info <- character(artist)
for(i in 1:len){
ifelse(nrow(searchArtist(Artist_Nam$ArtistName[i], token = keys))>=1,
artist_info[i] <- searchArtist(Artist_Nam$ArtistName[i], token = keys)$genres[1],
artist_info[i] <- "")
}
artist_info
I was expecting this to return a list of genres, and artists where there is not a match on spotify I would have an empty entry ""
Instead what is returned is a list and entries are populated with genres and on inspection these genres are correct and there are "" where there is no match however, something odd happens from [73] on wards (I have over 3,000 artists), the list now only returns "".
despite when i actually look into this using the searchArtist() manually there are matches.
I wonder if anyone has any suggestions or has experienced anything like this before?
There may be a rate limit to the number of requests you can make a minute and you may just be hitting that limit. Adding a small delay with Sys.sleep() within your loop to prevent you from hitting their API too hard to be throttled.
I am trying to write a manual rate-limiting function for the rgithub package. So far this is what I have:
library(rgithub)
pull <- function(i){
commits <- get.pull.request.commits(owner = owner, repo = repo, id = i, ctx = get.github.context(), per_page=100)
links <- digest_header_links(commits)
number_of_pages <- links[2,]$page
if (number_of_pages != 0)
try_default(for (n in 1:number_of_pages){
if (as.integer(commits$headers$`x-ratelimit-remaining`) < 5)
Sys.sleep(as.integer(commits$headers$`x-ratelimit-reset`)-as.POSIXct(Sys.time()) %>% as.integer())
else
get.pull.request.commits(owner = owner, repo = repo, id = i, ctx = get.github.context(), per_page=100, page = n)
}, default = NULL)
else
return(commits)
}
list <- c(500, 501, 502)
pull_lists <- lapply(list, pull)
The intention i that if the x-ratelimit-remaining variable goes below a certain threshold the script should wait until the time specified in x-ratelimit-reset has passed, and then continue the script. However, I'm not sure if this is the actual behavior of the if else set up that I have here.
The function runs fine, but I have some doubts about whether it actually does the rate limiting or whether it somehow skips that steps. Hence I ask: a) how can I find out if it actually does rate-limiting, and b) if not, how can I rewrite it so that it actually does rate limiting? Would a while condition/loop perhaps be better?
You can test if it does the rate limiting changing 5 to a large enough number and adding a display of the timing of Sys.sleep using:
print(system.time(Sys.sleep(...)))
That said, the function seems ok to me, unfortunately I cannot test it easily as rgithub is not available for my version of R (3.1.3).
Not a canonical answer, but some working example.
You should add some logging in your script, even kind of write.csv(append=TRUE).
I've implemented automatic antiddos process which prevent your ip to be banned by the exchange market. You can find it jangorecki/Rbitcoin/R/utils.R.
Rbitcoin.last_api_call is env object stored in package namespace, kind of session package cache.
This can help you with setting it in your package.
You should also consider a optional parallel supported version. Linking to database with concurrency read. My function can be easy modified to queue call and recheck timing every X seconds.
Edit
I forget to add that mentioned function support multiple source systems. That allows for example to extend your rgithub for bitbucket, etc. and still effectively manage API rate limiting.
I know there are other tools around like awstats or splunk, but I wonder whether there is some serious (web)server logfile analysis going on in R. I might not be the first thought to do it in R, but still R has nice visualization capabilities and also nice spatial packages. Do you know of any? Or is there a R package / code that handles the most common log file formats that one could build on? Or is it simply a very bad idea?
In connection with a project to build an analytics toolbox for our Network Ops guys,
i built one of these about two months ago. My employer has no problem if i open source it, so if anyone is interested i can put it up on my github repo. I assume it's most useful to this group if i build an R Package. I won't be able to do that straight away though
because i need to research the docs on package building with non-R code (it might be as simple as tossing the python bytecode files in /exec along with a suitable python runtime, but i have no idea).
I was actually suprised that i needed to undertake a project of this sort. There are at least several excellent open source and free log file parsers/viewers (including the excellent Webalyzer and AWStats) but neither parse server error logs (parsing server access logs is the primary use case for both).
If you are not familiar with error logs or with the difference between them and access
logs, in sum, Apache servers (likewsie, nginx and IIS) record two distinct logs and store them to disk by default next to each other in the same directory. On Mac OS X,
that directory in /var, just below root:
$> pwd
/var/log/apache2
$> ls
access_log error_log
For network diagnostics, error logs are often far more useful than the access logs.
They also happen to be significantly more difficult to process because of the unstructured nature of the data in many of the fields and more significantly, because the data file
you are left with after parsing is an irregular time series--you might have multiple entries keyed to a single timestamp, then the next entry is three seconds later, and so forth.
i wanted an app that i could toss in raw error logs (of any size, but usually several hundred MB at a time) have something useful come out the other end--which in this case, had to be some pre-packaged analytics and also a data cube available inside R for command-line analytics. Given this, i coded the raw-log parser in python, while the processor (e.g., gridding the parser output to create a regular time series) and all analytics and data visualization, i coded in R.
I have been building analytics tools for a long time, but only in the past
four years have i been using R. So my first impression--immediately upon parsing a raw log file and loading the data frame in R is what a pleasure R is to work with and how it is so well suited for tasks of this sort. A few welcome suprises:
Serialization. To persist working data in R is a single command
(save). I knew this, but i didn't know how efficient is this binary
format. Thee actual data: for every 50 MB of raw logfiles parsed, the
.RData representation was about 500 KB--100 : 1 compression. (Note: i
pushed this down further to about 300 : 1 by using the data.table
library and manually setting compression level argument to the save
function);
IO. My Data Warehouse relies heavily on a lightweight datastructure
server that resides entirely in RAM and writes to disk
asynchronously, called redis. The proect itself is only about two
years old, yet there's already a redis client for R in CRAN (by B.W.
Lewis, version 1.6.1 as of this post);
Primary Data Analysis. The purpose of this Project was to build a
Library for our Network Ops guys to use. My goal was a "one command =
one data view" type interface. So for instance, i used the excellent
googleVis Package to create a professional-looking
scrollable/paginated HTML tables with sortable columns, in which i
loaded a data frame of aggregated data (>5,000 lines). Just those few
interactive elments--e.g., sorting a column--delivered useful
descriptive analytics. Another example, i wrote a lot of thin
wrappers over some basic data juggling and table-like functions; each
of these functions i would for instance, bind to a clickable button
on a tabbed web page. Again, this was a pleasure to do in R, in part
becasue quite often the function required no wrapper, the single
command with the arguments supplied was enough to generate a useful
view of the data.
A couple of examples of the last bullet:
# what are the most common issues that cause an error to be logged?
err_order = function(df){
t0 = xtabs(~Issue_Descr, df)
m = cbind( names(t0), t0)
rownames(m) = NULL
colnames(m) = c("Cause", "Count")
x = m[,2]
x = as.numeric(x)
ndx = order(x, decreasing=T)
m = m[ndx,]
m1 = data.frame(Cause=m[,1], Count=as.numeric(m[,2]),
CountAsProp=100*as.numeric(m[,2])/dim(df)[1])
subset(m1, CountAsProp >= 1.)
}
# calling this function, passing in a data frame, returns something like:
Cause Count CountAsProp
1 'connect to unix://var/ failed' 200 40.0
2 'object buffered to temp file' 185 37.0
3 'connection refused' 94 18.8
The Primary Data Cube Displayed for Interactive Analysis Using googleVis:
A contingency table (from an xtab function call) displayed using googleVis)
It is in fact an excellent idea. R also has very good date/time capabilities, can do cluster analysis or use any variety of machine learning alogorithms, has three different regexp engines to parse etc pp.
And it may not be a novel idea. A few years ago I was in brief email contact with someone using R for proactive (rather than reactive) logfile analysis: Read the logs, (in their case) build time-series models, predict hot spots. That is so obviously a good idea. It was one of the Department of Energy labs but I no longer have a URL. Even outside of temporal patterns there is a lot one could do here.
I have used R to load and parse IIS Log files with some success here is my code.
Load IIS Log files
require(data.table)
setwd("Log File Directory")
# get a list of all the log files
log_files <- Sys.glob("*.log")
# This line
# 1) reads each log file
# 2) concatenates them
IIS <- do.call( "rbind", lapply( log_files, read.csv, sep = " ", header = FALSE, comment.char = "#", na.strings = "-" ) )
# Add field names - Copy the "Fields" line from one of the log files :header line
colnames(IIS) <- c("date", "time", "s_ip", "cs_method", "cs_uri_stem", "cs_uri_query", "s_port", "cs_username", "c_ip", "cs_User_Agent", "sc_status", "sc_substatus", "sc_win32_status", "sc_bytes", "cs_bytes", "time-taken")
#Change it to a data.table
IIS <- data.table( IIS )
#Query at will
IIS[, .N, by = list(sc_status,cs_username, cs_uri_stem,sc_win32_status) ]
I did a logfile-analysis recently using R. It was no real komplex thing, mostly descriptive tables. R's build-in functions were sufficient for this job.
The problem was the data storage as my logfiles were about 10 GB. Revolutions R does offer new methods to handle such big data, but I at last decided to use a MySQL-database as a backend (which in fact reduced the size to 2 GB though normalization).
That could also solve your problem in reading logfiles in R.
#!python
import argparse
import csv
import cStringIO as StringIO
class OurDialect:
escapechar = ','
delimiter = ' '
quoting = csv.QUOTE_NONE
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument('-f', '--source', type=str, dest='line', default=[['''54.67.81.141 - - [01/Apr/2015:13:39:22 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 502 173 "-" "curl/7.41.0" "-"'''], ['''54.67.81.141 - - [01/Apr/2015:13:39:22 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 502 173 "-" "curl/7.41.0" "-"''']])
arguments = parser.parse_args()
try:
with open(arguments.line, 'wb') as fin:
line = fin.readlines()
except:
pass
finally:
line = arguments.line
header = ['IP', 'Ident', 'User', 'Timestamp', 'Offset', 'HTTP Verb', 'HTTP Endpoint', 'HTTP Version', 'HTTP Return code', 'Size in bytes', 'User-Agent']
lines = [[l[:-1].replace('[', '"').replace(']', '"').replace('"', '') for l in l1] for l1 in line]
out = StringIO.StringIO()
writer = csv.writer(out)
writer.writerow(header)
writer = csv.writer(out,dialect=OurDialect)
writer.writerows([[l1 for l1 in l] for l in lines])
print(out.getvalue())
Demo output:
IP,Ident,User,Timestamp,Offset,HTTP Verb,HTTP Endpoint,HTTP Version,HTTP Return code,Size in bytes,User-Agent
54.67.81.141, -, -, 01/Apr/2015:13:39:22, +0000, GET, /, HTTP/1.1, 502, 173, -, curl/7.41.0, -
54.67.81.141, -, -, 01/Apr/2015:13:39:22, +0000, GET, /, HTTP/1.1, 502, 173, -, curl/7.41.0, -
This format can easily be read into R using read.csv. And, it doesn't require any 3rd party libraries.