Newspaper4k: Article Scraping & Curation, a continuation of the beloved newspaper3k by codelucas

Newspaper4k Project grew from a fork of the well known newspaper3k by codelucas which was not updated since September 2020. The initial goal of this fork was to keep the project alive and to add new features and fix bugs. As of version 0.9.3 there are many new features and improvements that make Newspaper4k a great tool for article scraping and curation. To make the migration to Newspaper4k easier, all the classes and methods from the original project were kept and the new features were added on top of them. All API calls from the original project still work as expected, such that for users familiar with newspaper3k you will feel right at home with Newspaper4k.

At the moment of the fork, in the original project were over 400 open issues, which I have duplicated, and as of v 0.9.3 only about 180 issues still need to be verified (many are already fixed, but it's pretty cumbersome to check - hint hint ... anyone contributing?). If you have any issues or feature requests please open an issue here.

Experimental ChatGPT helper bot for Newspaper4k:

Python compatibility

Quick start

Using the CLI

You can start directly from the command line, using the included CLI:

python -m newspaper --url="https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/17/success/job-seekers-use-ai/index.html" --language=en --output-format=json --output-file=article.json

More information about the CLI can be found in the CLI documentation.

Using the Python API

Alternatively, you can use Newspaper4k in Python:

Processing one article / url at a time

import newspaper

article = newspaper.article('https://edition.cnn.com/2023/10/29/sport/nfl-week-8-how-to-watch-spt-intl/index.html')

print(article.authors)
# ['Hannah Brewitt']

print(article.publish_date)
# 2023-10-29 09:00:15.717000+00:00

print(article.text)
# New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick, right, embraces Buffalo Bills head coach Sean McDermott ...

print(article.top_image)
# https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/231015223702-06-nfl-season-gallery-1015.jpg?c=16x9&q=w_800,c_fill

print(article.movies)
# []

article.nlp()
print(article.keywords)
# ['patrick', 'mahomes', 'history', 'nfl', 'week', 'broncos', 'denver', 'p', 'm', '00', 'pittsburgh',...]


print(article.summary)
# Kevin Sabitus/Getty Images Denver Broncos running back Javonte Williams evades Green Bay Packers safety Darnell Savage, bottom.
# Kathryn Riley/Getty Images Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes calls a play during the Chiefs' 19-8 Thursday Night Football win over the Denver Broncos on October 12.
# Paul Sancya/AP New York Jets running back Breece Hall carries the ball during a game against the Denver Broncos.
# The Broncos have not beaten the Chiefs since 2015, and have never beaten Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes.
# Australia: NFL+, ESPN, 7Plus Brazil: NFL+, ESPN Canada: NFL+, CTV, TSN, RDS Germany: NFL+, ProSieben MAXX, DAZN Mexico: NFL+, TUDN, ESPN, Fox Sports, Sky Sports UK: NFL+, Sky Sports, ITV, Channel 5 US: NFL+, CBS, NBC, FOX, ESPN, Amazon Prime

Parsing and scraping whole News Sources (websites) using the Source Class

This way you can build a Source object from a newspaper websites. This class will allow you to get all the articles and categories on the website. When you build the source, articles are not yet downloaded. The build() call will parse front page, will detect category links (if possible), get any RSS feeds published by the news site, and will create a list of article links. You need to call download_articles() to download the articles, but note that it can take a significant time.

download_articles() will download the articles in a multithreaded fashion using ThreadPoolExecutor from the concurrent package. The number of concurrent threads can be configured in Configuration.number_threads or passed as an argument to build().

import newspaper

cnn_paper = newspaper.build('http://cnn.com', number_threads=3)
print(cnn_paper.category_urls())

# ['https://cnn.com', 'https://money.cnn.com', 'https://arabic.cnn.com',
# 'https://cnnespanol.cnn.com', 'http://edition.cnn.com',
# 'https://edition.cnn.com', 'https://us.cnn.com', 'https://www.cnn.com']

article_urls = [article.url for article in cnn_paper.articles]
print(article_urls[:3])
# ['https://arabic.cnn.com/middle-east/article/2023/10/30/number-of-hostages-held-in-gaza-now-up-to-239-idf-spokesperson',
# 'https://arabic.cnn.com/middle-east/video/2023/10/30/v146619-sotu-sullivan-hostage-negotiations',
# 'https://arabic.cnn.com/middle-east/article/2023/10/29/norwegian-pm-israel-gaza']


article = cnn_paper.articles[0]
article.download()
article.parse()

print(article.title)
# المتحدث باسم الجيش الإسرائيلي: عدد الرهائن المحتجزين في غزة يصل إلى

Or if you want to get bulk articles from the website (have in mind that this could take a long time and could get your IP blocked by the newssite):

import newspaper

cnn_source = newspaper.build('http://cnn.com', number_threads=3)

print(len(newspaper.article_urls))

articles = source.download_articles()

print(len(articles))

print(articles[0].title)

As of version 0.9.3, Newspaper4k supports Google News as a special Source object

First, make sure you have the google extra installed, since we rely on the Gnews package to get the articles from Google News. You can install it using pip like this:

pip install newspaper4k[gnews]

Then you can use the GoogleNews class to get articles from Google News:

from newspaper.google_news import GoogleNewsSource

source = GoogleNewsSource(
    country="US",
    period="7d",
    max_results=10,
)

source.build(top_news=True)

print(source.article_urls())
# ['https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/18/politics/trump-464-million-dollar-bond/index.html', 'https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/18/politics/supreme-court-new-york-nra/index.html', ...
source.download_articles()

Multilanguage features

Newspaper can extract and detect languages seamlessly based on the article meta tags. Additionally, you can specify the language for the website / article. If no language is specified, Newspaper will attempt to auto detect a language from the available meta data. The fallback language is English.

Language detection is crucial for accurate article extraction. If the wrong language is detected or provided, chances are that no article text will be returned. Before parsing, check that your language is supported by our package.

from newspaper import Article

article = Article('https://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/simp/chinese-news-67084358')
article.download()
article.parse()

print(article.title)
# 晶片大战：台湾厂商助攻华为突破美国封锁？

if article.config.use_meta_language:
  # If we use the autodetected language, this config attribute will be true
  print(article.meta_lang)
else:
  print(article.config.language)

# zh

Docs

Check out The Docs for full and detailed guides using newspaper.

Features

• Multi-threaded article download framework
• Newspaper website category structure detection
• News url identification
• Google News integration
• Text extraction from html
• Top image extraction from html
• All image extraction from html
• Keyword building from the extracted text
• Automatic article text summarization
• Author extraction from text
• Easy to use Command Line Interface (python -m newspaper....)
• Output in various formats (json, csv, text)
• Works in 80+ languages (English, Chinese, German, Arabic, ...) see LANGUAGES.md for the full list of supported languages.

Evaluation

Evaluation Results

Using the dataset from ScrapingHub I created an evaluator script that compares the performance of newspaper against it's previous versions. This way we can see how newspaper updates improve or worsen the performance of the library.

Scraperhub Article Extraction Benchmark

Precision, Recall and F1 are computed using overlap of shingles with n-grams of size 4. The corpus BLEU score is computed using the nltk's bleu_score.

We also use our own, newly created dataset, the Newspaper Article Extraction Benchmark (NAEB) which is a collection of over 400 articles from 200 different news sources to evaluate the performance of the library.

Newspaper Article Extraction Benchmark

Requirements and dependencies

The package has two kinds of requirements:

• System libraries (needed for lxml and image support)
• Python package dependencies (installed via pip or a pinned requirements.txt)

System packages (common)

• Pillow: libjpeg-dev, zlib1g-dev, libpng-dev (or libpng12-dev on older systems)
• lxml: libxml2-dev, libxslt1-dev
• Python development headers: python3-dev

Debian / Ubuntu (install prerequisites):

    sudo apt-get install python3 python3-dev python3-pip libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libjpeg-dev zlib1g-dev libpng-dev

macOS (Homebrew):

    brew install libxml2 libxslt
    brew install libtiff libjpeg webp little-cms2

Installing the package (pip)

Basic install:

Optional extras

Newspaper4k exposes several optional extras that enable additional features:

• gnews — Google News integration (gnews package)
• nlp — NLP helpers (e.g. nltk)
• cloudflare — cloudscraper for Cloudflare-protected sites
• zh, th, ja, bn, hi,np, ta - language-specific NLP support (e.g. jieba for Chinese)
• all — a convenience extra that installs many language and helper packages

Examples:

    pip install newspaper4k[gnews]
    pip install "newspaper4k[gnews,nlp]"
    pip install newspaper4k[all]

Use whichever extras you need; extras can be combined as shown above.

Install using uv (recommended for reproducible, pinned installs)

uv can generate a pinned requirements.txt from pyproject.toml which is handy for deployments or for reproducible installs.

1. Install uv (if you don't have it):

2. add the newspaper4k package to your project using uv add (you must be in a project directory with a pyproject.toml file):

or if you want to include extras:

    uv add --all-groups newspaper4k

or uv add --group gnews newspaper4k

Notes

• If you encounter problems with libpng12-dev, try libpng-dev instead.
• The optional extras are declared in pyproject.toml under [project.optional-dependencies] (for example gnews, nlp, cloudflare, all).

Contributing

see CONTRIBUTING.md

LICENSE

Authored and maintained by Andrei Paraschiv.

Newspaper was originally developed by Lucas Ou-Yang (codelucas), the original repository can be found here. Newspaper is licensed under the MIT license.

Credits

Thanks to Lucas Ou-Yang for creating the original Newspaper3k project and to all contributors of the original project.