collyvsmechanize
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.
Mechanize is a Ruby library for automating interaction with websites. It automatically stores and sends cookies, follows redirects, and can submit forms — making it behave like a web browser without needing an actual browser engine.
Key features include:
- Automatic cookie management Stores cookies received from servers and sends them back on subsequent requests, maintaining session state across multiple pages.
- Form handling Can find, fill in, and submit HTML forms programmatically. Supports text inputs, selects, checkboxes, radio buttons, and file uploads.
- Link following Navigate through pages by clicking links using their text content, CSS selectors, or href patterns.
- History and back/forward Maintains a browsing history, allowing you to go back and forward through visited pages.
- HTTP authentication Supports basic and digest HTTP authentication.
- Proxy support Can route requests through HTTP proxies.
- Redirect handling Automatically follows HTTP redirects (configurable).
Mechanize is one of the oldest and most established web interaction libraries in Ruby. It is best suited for scraping traditional server-rendered websites with forms and multi-page workflows. For JavaScript-heavy sites, a browser automation tool like Selenium or Playwright is recommended instead.