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Neutron proposal deadline scaper

This program attempts to extract the proposal submission deadlines for various neutron facilities from the facility web pages.

This will be a brittle process and will likely need much care and tuning of the deadline extraction patterns in the code.

Requires

  • Web server
  • cron job scheduler
  • python 2.5 or above

Installation

Retrieve the current version of the source from:

https://github.com/pkienzle/beamtime

Edit scrape.py, changing WEBMASTER='' to:

WEBMASTER='[email protected]'

This will ensure that you are notified of errors during web scraping and allow you to adjust the rules accordingly.

To keep the information up to date, the following commands need to be run daily on your server:

$ python scrape.py > /var/www/deadline.html
$ chmod a+r /var/www/deadline.html

This is usually done using cron.

Adding facilities

To add a new facility, create a new class in scrape.py which defines the attributes name, url, and the method scrape(). The scrape method defines the attributes deadline and period if they are available, or raises an error. See the examples in the code for implementing scrape.

To extend this effectively, you will have to understand the python regular expression parser. In particular, note that we are using the pattern (.*?) to match a date, and match.group(1) to extract it. The parenthesis cause everything matched within them to be returned as a group, and the question mark limits it to the shortest possible match. If the result can span multiple lines you will need the re.DOTALL flag for the match.

When a facility is updated or a new facility is added you can test that the web scraping works using:

$ python scrape.py FACILITY > deadline.html

This will attempt to retrieve just the facility given by FACILITY.

Please post any updates to the scraping pattern to github.

Removing brittleness

Facilities could adopt a standard interface for exporting proposal deadline information, such as:

http://facility.web/info/proposal_deadline.json

which returns a static page in JSON format:

{
  'facility' : 'facility name',
  'url'      : 'http://link.to/proposal_system',
  'deadline' : 'string',
  'period'   : 'string',
}

For proposal systems where the deadline varies, using a standard date format such as 'YYYY-MM-DD' would be convenient.