README.Rmd

---
output: github_document
---

```{r, echo = FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
  comment = "##",
  fig.path = "README-"
)
```

# robotstxt <img src="man/figures/logo.jpeg" align="right" height="139" alt="Hand-drawn robot inside a hex sticker"/>

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```{r, echo=FALSE, include=FALSE}
devtools::load_all()
```

```{r, include=FALSE}
options("width"=100)
tmp <- packageDescription( basename(getwd()) )
```

```{r, results='asis', echo=FALSE}
cat(paste0(tmp$Title, ". "))
cat(tmp$Description)
```


## Installation

Install from CRAN using
```{r, eval=FALSE}
install.packages("robotstxt")
```

Or install the development version:
```{r, eval=FALSE}
devtools::install_github("ropensci/robotstxt")
```


## License

```{r, results='asis', echo=FALSE}
cat(tmp$License, "<br>")
cat(tmp$Author)
```


## Citation

```{r, comment = "", eval=TRUE, echo=FALSE}
citation("robotstxt")
```


## Usage

Review the [package index reference](https://docs.ropensci.org/robotstxt/reference/index.html) or use
```{r, eval=FALSE}
?robotstxt
```
for documentation.

Simple path access right checking (the functional way) ... 

```{r}
options(robotstxt_warn = FALSE)

paths_allowed(
  paths  = c("/api/rest_v1/?doc", "/w/"),
  domain = "wikipedia.org",
  bot    = "*"
)

paths_allowed(
  paths = c(
    "https://wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/?doc",
    "https://wikipedia.org/w/"
  )
)
```

... or (the object oriented way) ...

```{r}
options(robotstxt_warn = FALSE)

rtxt <- robotstxt(domain = "wikipedia.org")

rtxt$check(
  paths = c("/api/rest_v1/?doc", "/w/"),
  bot   = "*"
)
```


### Retrieval

Retrieving the robots.txt file for a domain: 

```{r}
# retrieval
rt <- get_robotstxt("https://petermeissner.de")

# printing
rt
```


###  Interpretation

Checking whether or not one is supposadly allowed to access some resource from a 
web server is - unfortunately - not just a matter of downloading and parsing a 
simple robots.txt file. 

First there is no official specification for robots.txt files so every robots.txt 
file written and every robots.txt file read and used is an interpretation. Most of
the time we all have a common understanding on how things are supposed to work 
but things get more complicated at the edges. 

Some interpretation problems:

- finding no robots.txt file at the server (e.g. HTTP status code 404) implies that everything is allowed
- subdomains should have there own robots.txt file if not it is assumed that everything is allowed
- redirects involving protocol changes - e.g. upgrading from http to https - are followed and considered no domain or subdomain change - so whatever is found at the end of the redirect is considered to be the robots.txt file for the original domain
- redirects from subdomain www to the domain is considered no domain change  - so whatever is found at the end of the redirect is considered to be the robots.txt file for the subdomain originally requested


### Event Handling

Because the interpretation of robots.txt rules not just depends on the rules specified within the file,
the package implements an event handler system that allows to interpret and re-interpret events into rules. 

Under the hood the `rt_request_handler()` function is called within `get_robotstxt()`. 
This function takes an {httr} request-response object and a set of event handlers. 
Processing the request and the handlers it checks for various events and states 
around getting the file and reading in its content. If an event/state happened
the event handlers are passed on to the `request_handler_handler()` along for 
problem resolution and collecting robots.txt file transformations:

- rule priorities decide if rules are applied given the current state priority
- if rules specify signals those are emitted (e.g. error, message, warning)
- often rules imply overwriting the raw content with a suitable interpretation given the circumstances the file was (or was not) retrieved


Event handler rules can either consist of 4 items or can be functions - the former being the usual case and that used throughout the package itself. 
Functions like `paths_allowed()` do have parameters that allow passing 
along handler rules or handler functions.

Handler rules are lists with the following items: 

- `over_write_file_with`: if the rule is triggered and has higher priority than those rules applied beforehand (i.e. the new priority has an higher value than the old priority) then the robots.txt file retrieved will be overwritten by this character vector
- `signal`: might be `"message"`, `"warning"`, or `"error"` and will use the signal function to signal the event/state just handled. Signaling a warning or a message might be suppressed by setting the function paramter `warn = FALSE`.
- `cache` should the package be allowed to cache the results of the retrieval or not
- `priority` the priority of the rule specified as numeric value, rules with higher priority will be allowed to overwrite robots.txt file content changed by rules with lower priority


The package knows the following rules with the following defaults: 

- `on_server_error` : 
  - given a server error - the server is unable to serve a file - we assume that something is terrible wrong and forbid all paths for the time being but do not cache the result so that we might get an updated file later on

    ```{r}
    on_server_error_default
    ```


- `on_client_error` : 
  - client errors encompass all HTTP status 4xx status codes except 404 which is handled directly
  - despite the fact that there are a lot of codes that might indicate that the client has to take action (authentication, billing, ... see: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP-Statuscode) in the case of retrieving robots.txt with simple GET request things should just work and any client error is treated as if there is no file available and thus scraping is generally allowed

    ```{r}
    on_client_error_default
    ```

- `on_not_found` : 
  - HTTP status code 404 has its own handler but is treated the same ways other client errors: if there is no file available and thus scraping is generally allowed


    ```{r}
    on_not_found_default
    ```

- `on_redirect` : 
  - redirects are ok - often redirects redirect from HTTP schema to HTTPS - {robotstxt} will use whatever content it has been redirected to

    ```{r}
    on_redirect_default
    ```

- `on_domain_change` : 
  - domain changes are handled as if the robots.txt file did not exist and thus scraping is generally allowed

    ```{r}
    on_domain_change_default
    ```

- `on_file_type_mismatch` : 
  - if {robotstxt} gets content with content type other than text it probably is not a robotstxt file, this situation is handled as if no file was provided and thus scraping is generally allowed

    ```{r}
    on_file_type_mismatch_default
    ```

- `on_suspect_content` :
  - if {robotstxt} cannot parse it probably is not a robotstxt file, this situation is handled as if no file was provided and thus scraping is generally allowed


    ```{r}
    on_suspect_content_default
    ```


### Design Map for Event/State Handling

**from version 0.7.x onwards**

While previous releases were concerned with implementing parsing and permission checking and improving performance the 0.7.x release will be about robots.txt retrieval foremost. While retrieval was implemented there are corner cases in the retrieval stage that very well influence the interpretation of permissions granted.


**Features and Problems handled:**

- now handles corner cases of retrieving robots.txt files
- e.g. if no robots.txt file is available this basically means "you can scrape it all" 
- but there are further corner cases (what if there is a server error, what if redirection takes place, what if redirection takes place to different domains, what if a file is returned but it is not parsable, or is of format HTML or JSON, ...)


**Design Decisions**

1. the whole HTTP request-response-chain is checked for certain event/state types
    - server error
    - client error
    - file not found (404)
    - redirection
    - redirection to another domain
2. the content returned by the HTTP is checked against 
    - mime type / file type specification mismatch 
    - suspicious content (file content does seem to be JSON, HTML, or XML instead of  robots.txt)
3. state/event handler define how these states and events are handled
4. a handler handler executes the rules defined in individual handlers
5. handler can be overwritten
6. handler defaults are defined that they should always do the right thing
7. handler can ...
    - overwrite the content of a robots.txt file (e.g. allow/disallow all)
    - modify how problems should be signaled: error, warning, message, none
    - if robots.txt file retrieval should be cached or not
8. problems (no matter how they were handled) are attached to the robots.txt's as attributes, allowing for ... 
    - transparency
    - reacting post-mortem to the problems that occured
9. all handler (even the actual execution of the HTTP-request) can be overwritten at runtime to inject user defined behaviour beforehand


### Warnings

By default all functions retrieving robots.txt files will warn if there are 

- any HTTP events happening while retrieving the file (e.g. redirects) or
- the content of the file does not seem to be a valid robots.txt file.

Warnings can be turned off in several ways: 

```{r, eval=FALSE}
suppressWarnings({
  paths_allowed("PATH_WITH_WARNING")
})
```

```{r, eval=FALSE}
paths_allowed("PATH_WITH_WARNING", warn = FALSE)
```

```{r, eval=FALSE}
options(robotstxt_warn = FALSE)
paths_allowed("PATH_WITH_WARNING")
```


### Inspection and Debugging

The robots.txt files retrieved are basically mere character vectors:

```{r}
rt <- get_robotstxt("petermeissner.de")

as.character(rt)

cat(rt)
```

The last HTTP request is stored in an object 

```{r}
rt_last_http$request
```

But they also have some additional information stored as attributes.

```{r}
names(attributes(rt))
```

Events that might change the interpretation of the rules found in the robots.txt file:

```{r}
attr(rt, "problems")
```

The {httr} request-response object that allwos to dig into what exactly was going on in the client-server exchange. 

```{r}
attr(rt, "request")
```

... or lets us retrieve the original content given back by the server:

```{r}
httr::content(
  x        = attr(rt, "request"),
  as       = "text",
  encoding = "UTF-8"
)
```

... or have a look at the actual HTTP request issued and all response headers given back by the server:

```{r}
# extract request-response object
rt_req <- attr(rt, "request")

# HTTP request
rt_req$request

# response headers
rt_req$all_headers
```


### Transformation

For convenience the package also includes a `as.list()` method for robots.txt files. 

```{r}
as.list(rt)
```


### Caching 

The retrieval of robots.txt files is cached on a per R-session basis. 
Restarting an R-session will invalidate the cache. Also using the the 
function parameter `force = TRUE` will force the package to re-retrieve the 
robots.txt file. 

```{r}
paths_allowed("petermeissner.de/I_want_to_scrape_this_now", force = TRUE, verbose = TRUE)
paths_allowed("petermeissner.de/I_want_to_scrape_this_now", verbose = TRUE)
```


## More information

- https://www.robotstxt.org/norobots-rfc.txt
- [Have a look at the vignette at https://cran.r-project.org/package=robotstxt/vignettes/using_robotstxt.html ](https://cran.r-project.org/package=robotstxt/vignettes/using_robotstxt.html)
- [Google on robots.txt](https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robots_txt?hl=en)
- https://wiki.selfhtml.org/wiki/Grundlagen/Robots.txt
- https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608?hl=en
- https://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html


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