kobe24's blog

Illegal to Parse a contest ?
By kobe24, 8 years ago, In English

Recently i got bored at competitive programming and i thought of learning new things .

Since i use codeforces parser extensively and fascinated by things people build using Web Scraping i started to learn how to build a parser During this i learnt about robots.txt file and saw codeforces robot.txt in which i saw this line Disallow: /contest/ but the parser that i use extensively parses contest and extracts the sample test cases , also there is no api to extract present contest problems/test cases.

So is it illegal to parse a contest ? Correct me if i am wrong

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8 years ago, # |
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I think it is legal. Robot.txt is for search engines. Just don't do more than 5 queries per second.

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    Yeah it might be a generalised file not intended for us , also this is the most detailed one i saw and this is the most funniest one

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8 years ago, # |
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You can do that with API, that is designed for program to access the website. (And all of them are under /api/, which is not in the list of robot.txt)

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    how do I parse a contest using api?

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    problems in a contest are not included in api , at least for test cases we cannot do it with api

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