Tech Forum

I was just going to scrape the standard works and study helps for my algorithmic personal study.

I'll probably just go to the permissions and ask about it.

Sorry this answer is a bit delayed, but there appears to be a RESTful API for Gospel Library content that is fairly old: http://tech.lds.org/wiki/Gospel_Library ... eb_Service

Have fun!

That's interesting. I didn't realize there was a published API. Note that sbradshaw added a redirect away from the page, so if the API still works, I think the church is making no commitment to maintaining it.

That page was from when the community was involved with the development of the Gospel Library apps. The documentation there hasn't been updated in years and I'm sure that the content format has changed since then. In addition, even when it was valid there was another page which indicated the API could only be used with permission (and as far as I know that permission was never given to anything other than official church sponsored applications).

So I very much doubt it works and even if it does, I don't think anyone has permission to use it.

kingc12 wrote:Isn't screen scraping usually discouraged by website owners, even if technically legal, due to server load? Or is scraping lds.org fine?

most websites have a "robots.txt" file that details which information you can and can't scrape from them. Although only Amazon and Google have good ways to stop scripts, and website owners couldn't stop you. it is good programming etiquette to add a piece of code that will read the robots.txt and prevent the script from accessing those regions of the website.
Some websites will allow specific bots, and some will block specific bots.

you can find it at "lds.org/robots.txt"

they disallow these regions of the website for all bots/scripts
User-agent: *
Disallow: /placestovisit/location/drive
Disallow: /institutes/calendar
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /services/platform
Disallow: /tools/feedback
Disallow: /languages