medium File Processing & Regex

Apache Log Analyzer

The Brief

A web hosting client reckons their site is being scraped. They have handed you a 200MB Apache access.log and they want answers — fast.

Build a log analyzer that parses the Combined Log Format, then reports: the top 10 IPs by request count, status code distribution, hourly traffic counts, and the top 10 most-requested URLs. The Apache combined format looks like:

IP - - [DD/Mon/YYYY:HH:MM:SS +ZZZZ] "METHOD /path HTTP/1.1" STATUS BYTES "REFERER" "USER_AGENT"

Acceptance Criteria

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1 Array

2 Array

3 Array

💡 Hints 0 / 5

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solution.py

Python 3

import re
from datetime import datetime
from collections import Counter

# Combined Log Format example:
# 1.2.3.4 - - [10/Oct/2026:13:55:36 +0000] "GET /index.html HTTP/1.1" 200 2326 "-" "Mozilla/5.0"

LOG_PATTERN = re.compile(
    # TODO: build regex with named groups: ip, timestamp, method, path, status, size
    r"\?"
)


def parse_line(line):
    # TODO: match LOG_PATTERN, return dict or None
    pass


def top_ips(lines, n=10):
    # TODO: parse, count, return top N
    pass


def status_distribution(lines):
    pass


def hourly_traffic(lines):
    pass


def top_paths(lines, n=10):
    pass

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