Normalize URLs during WARC import #886
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It turns out we've been missing some records because redirect URLs (in the 3xx response's `Location` header) do not always exactly match the requested target URL as recorded in the WARC record. This solves the problem by normalizing URLs before trying to match them. For example, `https://www.heat.gov/` recently stopped getting recorded because it started redirecting to `https://heat.gov`, which got recorded in the WARC as `https://heat.gov/`. No path is exactly equivalent to `/` (note this is not the case for other trailing slashes in paths!), but because we were looking for a URL without a path, we didn't find a record, even though the correct matching record was there, just with a `/` for its path. While working on this particular case, I noted some similar ones arising from variations on this same issue, like having redundant ports (e.g. the `443` is redundant here bcause it is an `https` scheme: `https://whatever.com:443/`).
Mr0grog
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Oct 7, 2025
Use this actions workflow to manually trigger a crawl's data to be re-imported into web-monitoring-db. Needed to remediate bad imports with the fixes from edgi-govdata-archiving/web-monitoring-processing#886.
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It turns out we've been missing some records because redirect URLs (in the 3xx response's
Locationheader) do not always exactly match the requested target URL as recorded in the WARC record. This solves the problem by normalizing URLs before trying to match them.For example,
https://www.heat.gov/recently stopped getting recorded because it started redirecting tohttps://heat.gov, which got recorded in the WARC ashttps://heat.gov/. The/path is exactly equivalent to an empty path, but because we were looking for a URL without a path, we didn't find a record, even though the correct matching record was there, just with a/for its path.While working on this particular case, I found some similar problems arising from variations on this same cause, like having redundant ports (e.g. the
443is redundant here because it is anhttpsscheme:https://whatever.com:443/).