Change method used to get site ranking. Not only has alexa.com change…

…d the format of their web site, they also seem to have gotten even more picky about people scraping it. So, use their API to query the site data.

Not sure why the API was not used earlier.  It is much more efficient as much less data is passed.  And, it is less likely to have its format changed randomly.  It did flake out on some sites one time I used it.  But, then it worked reliably next.  I am not going to do many requests, as it probably has some query rate limit.

site_list.py

@@ -5,25 +5,28 @@
 import sys
 import requests
 import threading
-from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as bs
+import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
 from datetime import datetime
 from argparse import ArgumentParser, RawDescriptionHelpFormatter
 
 pool = list()
 
 def get_rank(domain_to_query, dest):
     result = -1
-    url = "http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/" + domain_to_query
-    page = requests.get(url).text
-    soup = bs(page, features="lxml")
-    for span in soup.find_all('span'):
-        if span.has_attr("class"):
-            if "globleRank" in span["class"]:
-                for strong in span.find_all("strong"):
-                    if strong.has_attr("class"):
-                        if "metrics-data" in strong["class"]:
-                            result = int(strong.text.strip().replace(',', ''))
-                            dest['rank'] = result
+
+    #Retrieve ranking data via alexa API
+    url = f"http://data.alexa.com/data?cli=10&url={domain_to_query}"
+    xml_data = requests.get(url).text
+    root = ET.fromstring(xml_data)
+    try:
+        #Get ranking for this site.
+        dest['rank'] = int(root.find(".//REACH").attrib["RANK"])
+    except:
+        #We did not find the rank for some reason.
+        print(f"Error retrieving rank information for '{domain_to_query}'")
+        print(f"     Returned XML is |{xml_data}|")
+
+    return
 
 parser = ArgumentParser(formatter_class=RawDescriptionHelpFormatter
                         )