Simple Web Spider in Python

A sample Python web spider project that crawls a specified website using the requests library and BeautifulSoup. This project simulates requests from random IP addresses using the X-Forwarded-For header and provides a simple way to crawl and extract the content of web pages.

Features

• Crawl a specified website using a random IP address.
• Use the requests library to send HTTP requests.
• Extract and print the content of the web pages using BeautifulSoup.

Prerequisites

• Python 3.10
• Required libraries: requests and BeautifulSoup
  • Install them using pip install requests beautifulsoup4

Usage

Setup the Project

1. Clone or download the project files to your local machine.
2. Make sure you have the required libraries installed.

Run the Crawler

1. Open the webspider_crawler.py file in a Python editor or IDE.
2. Update the url variable in the crawl() function with the URL of the website you want to crawl.
3. Execute the script.

View the Crawled Content

• The script will simulate a request from a random IP address using the X-Forwarded-For header.
• The webpage's content will be printed to the console using BeautifulSoup.

Customization

• Modify the url variable in the crawl() function to crawl a different website.
• Adapt the script to extract specific information or perform further analysis on the crawled content as needed.

Limitations and Legal Considerations

• Respect the terms of service and any applicable legal restrictions when crawling websites.
• Be mindful of the website's usage limits and any rate restrictions to avoid overloading the server or violating any policies.