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scrapyvscolly

BSD-3-Clause 619 30 54,211
1.4 million (month) Jul 26 2019 2.12.0(9 months ago)
23,747 5 200 Apache-2.0
May 14 2018 v2.1.0(5 years ago)

Scrapy is an open-source Python library for web scraping. It allows developers to extract structured data from websites using a simple and consistent interface.

Scrapy provides:

  • A built-in way to follow links and extract data from multiple pages (crawling)
  • Handling common web scraping tasks such as logging in, handling cookies, and handling redirects.

Scrapy is built on top of the Twisted networking engine, which provides a non-blocking way to handle multiple requests at the same time, allowing Scrapy to efficiently scrape large websites.

It also comes with a built-in mechanism for handling common web scraping problems, such as:

  • handling HTTP errors
  • handling broken links

Scrapy also provide these features:

  • Support for storing scraped data in various formats, such as CSV, JSON, and XML.
  • Built-in support for selecting and extracting data using XPath or CSS selectors (through parsel).
  • Built-in support for handling common web scraping problems (like deduplication and url filtering).
  • Ability to easily extend its functionality using middlewares.
  • Ability to easily extend output processing using pipelines.

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.

Highlights


popularcss-selectorsxpath-selectorscommunity-toolsoutput-pipelinesmiddlewaresasyncproductionlarge-scale
popularcss-selectorsxpath-selectorscommunity-toolsoutput-pipelinesmiddlewaresasyncproductionlarge-scale

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/")
}

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