pastebin-scraper

This is a multithreaded scraping script for Pastebin. It scrapes the main site for new pastes, downloads their raw content and processes them by a user-defined output format.

WHY?

Fun.

Installation

The usual dance.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Define all required specs in settings.ini. Should you decide to go with a database output, make sure the respective connector is installed. At the moment MySQL with pymysql and SQLite with the standard built in Python 3 connector are supported.

Also note that the file output creates a subdirectory output and dumps every paste as a separate file into it.

Settings

ini is a highly underrated file format. Here are some definitions on what the settings parameter actually do.

GENERAL

• PasteLimit Stop after having scraped n pastes. Set to 0 for indefinite scraping
• PBLink URL to Pastebin or another equivalent site
• DownloadWorkers Number of workers that download the raw paste content and further process it
• NewPasteCheckInterval Time to wait before checking the main site for new pastes again
• IPBlockedWaitTime Time to wait until checking the main site again after the scraper's IP has been blocked

LOGGING

• RotationLog Location of log file that contains debug output
• MaxRotationSize Size in bytes before another log file is created
• RotationBackupCount Maximum number of log files to keep

STDOUT/ FILE

• Enable Enable formatted stdout output of paste data
• ContentDisplayLimit Maximum amount of characters to show before content is cut off (0 to display all)
• ShowName Display the paste name
• ShowLang Display the paste language
• ShowLink Display the complete paste link
• ShowData Display the raw paste content
• DataEncoding Encoding of the raw paste data

MYSQL

• Enable Enable MySQL output
• TableName Main table name to insert data into
• Host MySQL server host
• Port MySQL server port
• Username MySQL server user
• Password User password

SQLITE

• Enable Enable SQLite output
• Filename Filename the db should be saved as (usually ends with .db)
• TableName Main table name to insert data into

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If you use this thing for some cool data analysis or even research, let me know if I can help!

Inspiration for this scraper was taken from here.