Bio and Publications

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Enriched Details of Apache Common Log Format

See Apache Log Parsing for the background.

Here's a generator function which expands a simple Access to be a more detailed named tuple.


Access_Details= namedtuple( 'Access_Details',
    ['access', 'time', 'method', 'url', 'protocol'] )
            
def details_iter( iterable ):
    def parse_time_linux( ts ):
        return datetime.datetime.strptime( ts, "%d/%b/%Y:%H:%M:%S %z" )

    def parse_time_macos( ts ):
        dt= datetime.datetime.strptime( ts[:-6], "%d/%b/%Y:%H:%M:%S" )
        tz_text= ts[-6:]
        sign, hh, mm = tz_text[:1], int(tz_text[1:3]), int(tz_text[3:])
        minutes= (hh*60+mm) * (-1 if sign == '-' else +1)
        offset = datetime.timedelta(minutes = minutes)
        tz= datetime.timezone( offset, tz_text )
        return dt.replace(tzinfo=tz)
        return dt

    first, last = None, None
    for access in iterable:
        meth, uri, protocol = access.request.split()
        dt= parse_time_macos( access.time )
        first= min(dt,first) if first else dt
        last= max(dt,last) if last else dt
        yield Access_Details(
            access= access,
            time= dt,
            method= meth,
            url= urllib.parse.urlparse(uri),
            protocol= protocol )

    print( "Log Data from", first, "to", last, 'duration', last-first )


This "wraps" the original Access object with an Access_Details that includes information that isn't trivially parsed from the access row.
  • The datetime object with the real timestamp.  Not the Mac OS subtlety.  Due to platform issues, the %z strptime format doesn't seem to work in Python 3.2
  • The three fields from the request: method, URL and protocol.  
  • The URL is parsed into its individual fields.
Note that the Access_Details object is pickle-able.  While seemingly irrelevant, it turns out that having something which can be pickled means that we can use multiprocessing to create a multi-staged concurrent pipeline of log analysis.

What's important here is that we're adding functionality without redefining the underlying Access class. Indeed, the underlying Access object is immutable.  The idea of stateless values comes from the functional programming crowd.  It seems to work out really well because the functionality seems to accrete in relatively simple layers.

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