Protego

Protego is a pure-Python robots.txt parser with support for modern conventions.

Install

To install Protego, simply use pip:

pip install protego

Usage

>>> from protego import Protego
>>> robotstxt = """
... User-agent: *
... Disallow: /
... Allow: /about
... Allow: /account
... Disallow: /account/contact$
... Disallow: /account/*/profile
... Crawl-delay: 4
... Request-rate: 10/1m                 # 10 requests every 1 minute
...
... Sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap-index.xml
... Host: http://example.co.in
... """
>>> rp = Protego.parse(robotstxt)
>>> rp.can_fetch("http://example.com/profiles", "mybot")
False
>>> rp.can_fetch("http://example.com/about", "mybot")
True
>>> rp.can_fetch("http://example.com/account", "mybot")
True
>>> rp.can_fetch("http://example.com/account/myuser/profile", "mybot")
False
>>> rp.can_fetch("http://example.com/account/contact", "mybot")
False
>>> rp.crawl_delay("mybot")
4.0
>>> rp.request_rate("mybot")
RequestRate(requests=10, seconds=60, start_time=None, end_time=None)
>>> list(rp.sitemaps)
['http://example.com/sitemap-index.xml']
>>> rp.preferred_host
'http://example.co.in'

Using Protego with Requests:

>>> from protego import Protego
>>> import requests
>>> r = requests.get("https://google.com/robots.txt")
>>> rp = Protego.parse(r.text)
>>> rp.can_fetch("https://google.com/search", "mybot")
False
>>> rp.can_fetch("https://google.com/search/about", "mybot")
True
>>> list(rp.sitemaps)
['https://www.google.com/sitemap.xml']

Comparison

The following table compares Protego to the most popular robots.txt parsers implemented in Python or featuring Python bindings:

	Protego	RobotFileParser	Reppy	Robotexclusionrulesparser
Implementation language	Python	Python	C++	Python
Reference specification	Google	Martijn Koster’s 1996 draft
Wildcard support	✓		✓	✓
Length-based precedence	✓		✓
Performance		+40%	+1300%	-25%

API Reference

Class protego.Protego:

Properties

• sitemaps {list_iterator} A list of sitemaps specified in robots.txt.
• preferred_host {string} Preferred host specified in robots.txt.

Methods

• parse(robotstxt_body) Parse robots.txt and return a new instance of protego.Protego.
• can_fetch(url, user_agent) Return True if the user agent can fetch the URL, otherwise return False.
• crawl_delay(user_agent) Return the crawl delay specified for the user agent as a float. If nothing is specified, return None.
• request_rate(user_agent) Return the request rate specified for the user agent as a named tuple RequestRate(requests, seconds, start_time, end_time). If nothing is specified, return None.
• visit_time(user_agent) Return the visit time specified for the user agent as a named tuple VisitTime(start_time, end_time). If nothing is specified, return None.