how to create a crawler in matlab

MATLAB provides functionality for web scraping using its built-in functions webread and websave. These functions allow fetching web content and storing it in MATLAB. Here's an example to create a simple web crawler:

main.m
% Initialize the URL queue with the starting URL
urlQueue = {'https://example.com'};

% Set the maximum number of URLs to crawl
maxURLs = 10;

% Initialize the crawled URLs and the current iteration
crawledURLs = {};
currentIteration = 1;

% While there are URLs to crawl
while ~isempty(urlQueue) && currentIteration <= maxURLs
    % Get the next URL from the queue
    currentURL = urlQueue{1};
    urlQueue(1) = [];
    
    % Skip the URL if it has already been crawled
    if ismember(currentURL, crawledURLs)
        continue;
    end
    
    % Store the content of the current URL in MATLAB
    filename = websave('temp.html', currentURL);
    filecontent = fileread(filename);
    
    % Extract the URLs from the current URL
    links = regexp(filecontent, '<a href="(.*?)">', 'tokens');
    % Remove the extra information from the links
    links = unique(cellfun(@(x) x{1}, links, 'UniformOutput', false));
    
    % Add the new URLs to the URL queue
    urlQueue = [urlQueue, links];
    
    % Append the current URL to the crawled URLs list
    crawledURLs{end+1} = currentURL;
    
    % Increment the iteration counter
    currentIteration = currentIteration + 1;
end
1185 chars
40 lines

This code starts with a single URL and crawls the links on the page up to a certain limit. The code uses websave to download the HTML content of each page and regexp to extract links from the HTML. The URLs crawled are stored in a queue to be processed later, and the loop stops once the limit has been reached or there are no more URLs in the queue.

related categories

gistlibby LogSnag