Categories
Development

Invalid data, what it is?

Often we see “invalid data”, “clean data”, “normalize data”. What does it mean as to practical data extraction and how does one deal with that? One shot is better than 1000 words though:

The value k. A. in the highlighted cells might jeopardize data processing if not properly dealt with.
Categories
Data Mining

Simple text analysis with Python

Finding the most similar sentence(s) to a given sentence in a text in less than 40 lines of code 🙂

Categories
Development

Strip HTML tags with and without inner content in JavaScript

function strip_tags(str){
   const tags = ['a', 'em', 'div', 'span', 'p', 'i', 'button', 'img' ];
   const tagsAndContent = ['picture', 'script', 'noscript', 'source'];  	 
   for(tag of tagsAndContent){ 
      let regex = new RegExp( '<' + tag+ '.*?</' + tag + '>', 'gim');
      str = str.replace( regex ,"");
   }
   for(tag of tags){
      let regex1 = new RegExp( '<' + tag+ '.*?>', 'gim');
      let regex2 = new RegExp( '</' + tag+ '>', 'gim');
      str = str.replace(regex1,"").replace(regex2,""); 
   } 
   return str;
}
Categories
Development

JavaScript, Regex match groups

Often we want only a certain info from the matched content. So, groups help with that.

The following example shows how to fetch the [duplicate] entry index from the error message. For that we take 1st group, index “1”:

const regex = /Duplicate entry\s'([^']+)+'/gm;
const str = `{ Error: (conn=42434, no: 1062, SQLState: 23000) Duplicate entry '135' for key 'PRIMARY'
sql: INSERT INTO \`test\` (id , string1) values (?,?) - parameters:[[135,'string 756']]
    at Object.module.exports.createError (C:\\Users\\User\\Documents\\RnD\\Node.js\\mercateo-`;
let m;

while ((m = regex.exec(str)) !== null) {
    // This is necessary to avoid infinite loops with zero-width matches
    if (m.index === regex.lastIndex) {
        regex.lastIndex++;
    }
    
    // The result can be accessed through the `m`-variable.
    m.forEach((match, groupIndex) => {
        console.log(`Found match, group ${groupIndex}: ${match}`);
    });
}
Categories
Development

Cheerio scraper escapes special symbols with html entities when performing .html()

As developers scrape data off the web, we use Node.js along with handy Cheerio scraper. When fetching .html() Cheerio parser returns the special symbols as HTML encoded entities, eg.:
ä as &auml;
ß as &#xDF;

Cheerio developer vindication of the parser action

(1) It’s not the job of a parser to preserve the original document. 
(2) .html() returns an HTML representation of the parsed document, which doesn’t have to be equal to the original document.
source.

Categories
Development

Node.js, mariaDB, save data & bulk save

Imstall mariadb package:

npm i mariadb

The code

const config = require("./config");
const db = config.database;
const mariadb = require('mariadb');
const pool = mariadb.createPool({
     host: db.host,
	 user: db.user,
	 password: db.password,
	 database: db.database,
     connectionLimit: 5
});
 
async function asyncSaveDataDB(data) {
  let conn;
  try {
	conn = await pool.getConnection();
	const rows = await conn.query("SELECT 1 as val");
	console.log(rows); //[ {val: 1}, meta: ... ]
	const res = await conn.query("INSERT INTO test (string1) value (?)", [data]);
	console.log(res); // { affectedRows: 1, insertId: 1, warningStatus: 0 }

  } catch (err) {
	throw err;
  } finally {
	if (conn) return conn.end();
  }
}

async function asyncSaveDataBulkDB(arr) {
  let conn;
  try {
	conn = await pool.getConnection();
	conn.batch("INSERT INTO `test` (string1) values (?)", arr)
    .then(res => {
         console.log(res); // 2
    });	 

  } catch (err) {
	throw err;
  } finally {
	if (conn) return conn.end();
  }
}

if (module.parent) {
    module.exports = { asyncSaveDataDB, asyncSaveDataBulkDB }
} else {
    asyncSaveDataBulkDB(['tt6', 'test 8']);
}

Config.js might look like the following:

module.exports = {
  database:{
    host: "185.221.154.249",
	user: "xxxxxxxxx",
	password: "xxxxxxxxx",
	database: 'xxxxxxxxx'
  }
}

Docs on mariaDb with Node.js

Categories
Development

Centos 7, Node.js, MySQL connect

I’ve mariadb installed on my VDS with Centos 7.
I’ve installed mysql npm package:

npm i mysql

Yet requesting that package with

var mysql = require('mysql');

has not provided to the successful connection.
While

var mysql = require('mariadb');

has done.

var mysql = require('mariadb');

var con = mysql.createConnection({
  host: "localhost",
  user: "admin_default",
  password: "xxxxxx",
  database: 'admin_default'
}).then(function (){
   console.log('connected!');
}, function(err){
   console.log(err);
});
//console.log(con);
Categories
Development

How to find out that website is Distil protected?

Given: a webpage to scrape.
If you inspect the DOM tree of that page you will find that quite a few tags are having the keyword dist. As an example:

  • <link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/x-icon" href="/wcsstore/ColesResponsiveStorefrontAssetStore/dist/30e70cfc76bf73d384beffa80ba6cbee/img/favicon.ico">
  • <link rel="stylesheet" href="/wcsstore/ColesResponsiveStorefrontAssetStore/dist/30e70cfc76bf73d384beffa80ba6cbee/css/google/fonts-Source-Sans-Pro.css" type="text/css" media="screen">
Categories
Challenge

How Imperva protects against scraping bots

Imperva (that includes the former Distil anti-bot management) is a service providing many kinds of website protections. The present Imperva services include the following ones:

  1. Cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)
  2. Bot Protection service (formerly Distil Networks)
  3. IP Reputation Intelligence
  4. Content Delivery Network (CDN)
  5. Attack Analytics solution (eg. DDoS)

As to the protection of the bot scraping activities we mention the following.

Categories
Development

Save input value on page refresh using sessionStorage