For really quick one-off scraping, httplib2+lxml+PyQuery is a pretty neat combination:

  import httplib2, lxml, pyquery
  h = httplib2.Http(".cache")
  def get(url):
      resp, content = h.request(  url, headers={'cache-control':'max-age=3600'})
      return pyquery.PyQuery( lxml.etree.HTML(content) )

This gives you a little function that fetches any URL as a jquery-like object:

  pq = get("http://foo.com/bar")
  checkboxes = pq('form input[type=checkbox]')
  nextpage = pq('a.next').attr('href')

And of course all of the requests are cached using whatever cache headers you want, so repeated requests will load instantly as you iterate.

Just something else to throw in the toolbelt ...

    import requests
    from lxml import etree

    jquery_like_page = etree.HTML(requests.get('url').text)

Also check this out for a pretty good discussion on scraping http://pyvideo.org/video/609/web-scraping-reliably-and-effic...

Here's the same functionality written in Ruby using Chris Kite's crawler called Anemone[1]. Gist: https://gist.github.com/2475824. Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/cbv9A.png

[1]: http://anemone.rubyforge.org/doc/index.html

Cool. BTW, is there a reason for naming the file "isullshit_spiders.py" and not as "isbullshit_spiders.py"? :)

I really want to read. Topic is right down my alley.

Unfortunately, the page is literally broken and unreadable on Android ICS with Chrome :(