Web Scraping with Python

Disk cache

To cache downloads, we will first try the obvious solution and save web pages to the filesystem. To do this, we will need a way to map URLs to a safe cross-platform filename. The following table lists the limitations for some popular filesystems:

Operating system	File system	Invalid filename characters	Maximum filename length
Linux	Ext3/Ext4	/ and \0	255 bytes
OS X	HFS Plus	: and \0	255 UTF-16 code units
Windows	NTFS	\, /, ?, :, *, ", >, <, and |	255 characters

To keep our file path safe across these filesystems, it needs to be restricted to numbers, letters, basic punctuation, and replace all other characters with an underscore, as shown in the following code:

>>> import re >>> url = 'http://example.webscraping.com/default/view/Australia-1' ...