Scott Yang's Playground

Need to analyse a list of top sites in Australia, and the following Python scripts helped me to get the site name + domain name off from Alexa with minimum effort:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import re, urllib
r = r'<a  href="/siteinfo/(.*?)"  ><strong>(.*?)</strong>';
for i in range(25):
    u = 'http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries;%d/AU' % i
    for x, m in enumerate(re.findall(r, urllib.urlopen(u).read())):
        print '%d. %s (%s)' % (x + 1 + i * 20, m[1], m[0].strip())

YMMV. Considering how Alexa has been trying to obfuscate their HTML pages to prevent scrapping, I won’t be surprised that this script stops to work tomorrow…