Question

How can I download multiple links simultaneously? My script below works but only downloads one at a time and it is extremely slow. I can’t figure out how to incorporate multithreading in my script.

The Python script:

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
import lxml.html as html
import urlparse
import os, sys
import urllib2
import re

print ("downloading and parsing Bibles...")
root = html.parse(open('links.html'))
for link in root.findall('//a'):
  url = link.get('href')
  name = urlparse.urlparse(url).path.split('/')[-1]
  dirname = urlparse.urlparse(url).path.split('.')[-1]
  f = urllib2.urlopen(url)
  s = f.read()
  if (os.path.isdir(dirname) == 0): 
    os.mkdir(dirname)
  soup = BeautifulSoup(s)
  articleTag = soup.html.body.article
  converted = str(articleTag)
  full_path = os.path.join(dirname, name)
  open(full_path, 'w').write(converted)
  print(name)

The HTML file called links.html:

<a href="http://www.youversion.com/bible/gen.1.nmv-fas">http://www.youversion.com/bible/gen.1.nmv-fas</a>

<a href="http://www.youversion.com/bible/gen.2.nmv-fas">http://www.youversion.com/bible/gen.2.nmv-fas</a>

<a href="http://www.youversion.com/bible/gen.3.nmv-fas">http://www.youversion.com/bible/gen.3.nmv-fas</a>

<a href="http://www.youversion.com/bible/gen.4.nmv-fas">http://www.youversion.com/bible/gen.4.nmv-fas</a>

Answer 1

It looks to me like the consumer – producer problem – see wikipedia

You may use

import Queue, thread

# create a Queue.Queue here
queue = Queue.Queue()

print ("downloading and parsing Bibles...")
root = html.parse(open('links.html'))
for link in root.findall('//a'):
  url = link.get('href')
  queue.put(url) # produce




def thrad():
  url = queue.get() # consume
  name = urlparse.urlparse(url).path.split('/')[-1]
  dirname = urlparse.urlparse(url).path.split('.')[-1]
  f = urllib2.urlopen(url)
  s = f.read()
  if (os.path.isdir(dirname) == 0): 
    os.mkdir(dirname)
  soup = BeautifulSoup(s)
  articleTag = soup.html.body.article
  converted = str(articleTag)
  full_path = os.path.join(dirname, name)
  open(full_path, 'wb').write(converted)
  print(name)

thread.start_new(thrad, ()) # start 1 threads