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This is my first "serious" project after learning python for a while. The purpose of this script is to scrape proxies and check if they pass HTTPS websites. The main functionality is:

  • Get args and set (if there are any)
  • Get links to scrape from
  • Scrape for proxies and save them to a file
  • Check the scraped proxies using concurrency (threading) while saving the hits to a new file.

I've heard one of the best ways to learn is to get feedback, and I don't have anyone close to me who has anything related to programming. I hope you guys could help me out and give me a harsh feedback.

proxy_tool.py

import requests
import re
import data
import time
import sys
import os
import argparse
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from multiprocessing import Pool
from multiprocessing.dummy import Pool as ThreadPool

# Get's list of url's with proxies

def get_links():
    links = []
    keyword = 'server-list'
    index_url = 'http://www.proxyserverlist24.top/'
    page = requests.get(index_url)
    soup = BeautifulSoup(page.text, 'html.parser')
    temp_links = soup.find_all('a')
    for atag in temp_links:
        link = atag.get('href')
        if atag.get('href') is None:
            pass
        elif keyword in link and '#' not in link and link not in links:
            links.append(link)
    return links

# Scrape most recently uploaded proxies and returns a list of proxies
# according to the maximum amount entered by the user (default 800)

def scrape(links):
    url = links[0]
    page = requests.get(url)
    ip_list = re.findall(r'[0-9]+(?:\.[0-9]+){3}:[0-9]+', page.text)
    return max_proxies(ip_list,data.max)

# Save scraped list into a file

def save_scraped(ip_list):
    if os.path.isfile(data.filename):
        os.remove(data.filename)
    with open(data.filename,'a') as wfile:
        for ip in ip_list:
            wfile.write(ip)
            wfile.write('\n')
    print('[!] {} Proxies were scraped and saved ! '.format(len(ip_list)))

# Maximum amount of proxies to scrape

def max_proxies(ip_list, max):
    ip_list = ip_list.copy()
    return ip_list[0:max]

# Check if proxy is alive and gets a 200 response 

def is_good(p):
    proxy = {'https' : '{}'.format(p)}
    try :
        r = requests.get(data.url,proxies=proxy,headers=data.headers,timeout=data.timeout)
        if r.status_code is 200:
            hits_count(p)
            save_hits(p)
    except (requests.exceptions.Timeout,
            requests.exceptions.ProxyError,
            requests.exceptions.SSLError,
            requests.exceptions.ConnectionError) as e:
        pass

# Save working proxy to a file

def save_hits(p):
    with open('{} Checked ProxyList.txt'.format(data.date),'a') as wfile:
        wfile.write(p)
        wfile.write('\n')

# Count hits to display when script finished executing 

def hits_count(p):
    data.hits += 1
    print('[+] HIT - {}'.format(p))

def hits():
    print('[!] {} Proxies checked and saved !'.format(data.hits))

def check_args(args=None):
    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='A script to quickly get alive HTTPS proxies')
    parser.add_argument('-u', '--url', type=str, help='url to check proxy against', required=False, default='https://www.google.com')
    parser.add_argument('-m', '--max', type=int, help='maximum proxies to scrape', required=False, default=800)
    parser.add_argument('-t', '--timeout', type=int, help='set proxy timeout limit', required=False, default=8)
    parser.add_argument('-st', '--set-threads', type=int, help='set number of threads to run', required=False, default=30)


    results = parser.parse_args(args)
    return(results.url, results.max, results.timeout, results.set_threads)

# Check multiple proxies at once from a given proxy list

def check(p_list):

    pool = ThreadPool(data.num_threads)
    pool.map(is_good,p_list)
    pool.close()
    pool.join()

def main():

# Get_links returns a list with links which is passed to scrape() to scrape from
# which returns a proxy list to save in a file
    save_scraped(scrape(get_links()))

    p_list = open(data.filename).read().splitlines()
    check(p_list)
    hits()

if __name__ == "__main__":
# Set user input
    data.url, data.max, data.timeout, data.num_threads = check_args(sys.argv[1:])
    main()

data.py

This is responsible for holding data.

import random
import datetime

user_agent_list = [
    # Chrome
    'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/60.0.3112.113 Safari/537.36',
    'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/60.0.3112.90 Safari/537.36',
    'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/60.0.3112.90 Safari/537.36',
    'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/60.0.3112.90 Safari/537.36',
    'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/44.0.2403.157 Safari/537.36',
    'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/60.0.3112.113 Safari/537.36',
    'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/57.0.2987.133 Safari/537.36',
    'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/57.0.2987.133 Safari/537.36',
    'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/55.0.2883.87 Safari/537.36',
    'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/55.0.2883.87 Safari/537.36',
    # Firefox
    'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1)',
    'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko',
    'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/5.0)',
    'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko',
    'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko',
    'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko',
    'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/5.0)',
    'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko',
    'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/5.0)',
    'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko',
    'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/6.0)',
    'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/6.0)',
    'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)'
]

headers = {'User-Agent': random.choice(user_agent_list)}

date = datetime.datetime.today().strftime('%Y-%m-%d')
filename = '{} ProxyList.txt'.format(date)
threads = []
url = 'https://www.google.com'
timeout = 8
hits = 0
num_threads = 30
max = 800

I have some specific questions:

  1. Is using an external module to hold data like I did in data.py considered to be a good practice, or should I create the variables in main()? (it looks cleaner this way)
  2. Is using a lot of functions even for small things like I did with hits() or hits_count() considered to be a good practice ?
  3. How I implemented save_scraped(scrape(get_links())) looks pretty messy to me, but I tried to avoid using global variables; is that good practice?
  4. By changing to asyncio instead of threading could I achieve faster performance while checking the proxies?
  5. Is my PEP standard conformance okay?

That's all I can think of right now. Feel free to suggest anything from more pythonic code to a better implementation of a function or whatever comes to your mind.

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1 Answer 1

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  1. Of course. You can also do another thing: keep all the user agents in a separate file (eg. ua.txt) and then combine rest of the code with main file. With a one-liner, you can fetch all user-agents in the user_agents_list.

    for line in open('ua.txt').read().splitlines():
    user_agents_list.append(line.strip())

    But if you like it that way, just keep it. Remember code is all about the person who writes it, not one who reads it.

  2. You should not use different functions for different things unless you need to call/use them more than once.

  3. Of course. But you should give some comments to let the code reviewer know what you're up to in that part of the code. :)
  4. Instead of changing over to asyncio, you should know How to Wield Threaded Asynchronous Magic.
  5. Yes but you should add DocStrings. To test your code for the PEP standard use a linter such as flake8.

Hope this helps.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ About the user agent list , i've actually found a library that handles all of those strings pretty nicely fake-useragent . I also added comments to the code to make it more readable . Didn't know about flake8 or linter i would surely use them . Thank you for your insight , much appreciated ! \$\endgroup\$
    – shaike
    Oct 25, 2018 at 12:02
  • \$\begingroup\$ Another note here, avoid using external libraries unless you need them. It makes your execution runtime considerably slower. For example avoid importing and using an external library such as fake-useragent here, when you can have your own set of selected useragents. Edit: I missed a link in point 4 which I noticed just now. Check the updated answer. \$\endgroup\$
    – 0xInfection
    Oct 26, 2018 at 11:06

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