collyvspanther
Colly is a popular web scraping library for the Go programming language. It's designed to be fast and easy to use, and it provides a simple and flexible API for traversing and extracting information from websites.
Colly supports:
- Concurrent scraping with a simple API
- Automatic handling of cookies and sessions
- Automatic handling of redirects
- Support for parsing HTML and XML
- Support for parsing JSON and binary data
- Support for custom storage (e.g. scraping results to a database)
- Simple JavaScript rendering with Colly's built-in rendering engine.
Colly also provides several optional features, such as support for user-agents, delay between requests, rate-limiting and proxy usage.
Colly's API is quite simple, and it is easy to get started with basic web scraping tasks. It's a good choice for scraping moderate to heavy sites, and it can be useful for a wide range of use cases, such as data mining, content extraction, and more.
Additionally, you can use it together with Goquery, a library that allow you to make jquery like queries on HTML documents and it is often used together with Colly to ease the way of parsing the HTML.
Panther is a convenient standalone library to scrape websites and to run end-to-end tests using real browsers.
Panther is super powerful. It leverages the W3C's WebDriver protocol to drive native web browsers such as Google Chrome and Firefox.
Panther is very easy to use, because it implements Symfony's popular BrowserKit and DomCrawler APIs, and contains all the features you need to test your apps. It will sound familiar if you have ever created a functional test for a Symfony app: as the API is exactly the same! Keep in mind that Panther can be used in every PHP project, as it is a standalone library.
Panther automatically finds your local installation of Chrome or Firefox and launches them, so you don't need to install anything else on your computer, a Selenium server is not needed!
In test mode, Panther automatically starts your application using the PHP built-in web-server. You can focus on writing your tests or web-scraping scenario and Panther will take care of everything else.
Features:
- executes the JavaScript code contained in webpages
- supports everything that Chrome (or Firefox) implements
- allows taking screenshots
- can wait for asynchronously loaded elements to show up
- lets you run your own JS code or XPath queries in the context of the loaded page
- supports custom Selenium server installations
- supports remote browser testing services including SauceLabs and BrowserStack
Highlights
Example Use
package main
import (
"fmt"
"github.com/gocolly/colly/v2"
)
func main() {
// Instantiate default collector
c := colly.NewCollector(
// Visit only domains: hackerspaces.org, wiki.hackerspaces.org
colly.AllowedDomains("hackerspaces.org", "wiki.hackerspaces.org"),
)
// On every a element which has href attribute call callback
c.OnHTML("a[href]", func(e *colly.HTMLElement) {
link := e.Attr("href")
// Print link
fmt.Printf("Link found: %q -> %s\n", e.Text, link)
// Visit link found on page
// Only those links are visited which are in AllowedDomains
c.Visit(e.Request.AbsoluteURL(link))
})
// Before making a request print "Visiting ..."
c.OnRequest(func(r *colly.Request) {
fmt.Println("Visiting", r.URL.String())
})
// Start scraping on https://hackerspaces.org
c.Visit("https://hackerspaces.org/")
}
<?php
use Symfony\Component\Panther\Client;
require __DIR__.'/vendor/autoload.php'; // Composer's autoloader
$client = Client::createChromeClient();
// Or, if you care about the open web and prefer to use Firefox
$client = Client::createFirefoxClient();
$client->request('GET', 'https://api-platform.com'); // Yes, this website is 100% written in JavaScript
$client->clickLink('Get started');
// Wait for an element to be present in the DOM (even if hidden)
$crawler = $client->waitFor('#installing-the-framework');
// Alternatively, wait for an element to be visible
$crawler = $client->waitForVisibility('#installing-the-framework');
echo $crawler->filter('#installing-the-framework')->text();
$client->takeScreenshot('screen.png'); // Yeah, screenshot!