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collyvswombat

Apache-2.0 187 5 22,459
May 14 2018 v2.1.0(4 years ago)
1,308 2 24 MIT
Dec 27 2011 1.6 thousand (month) 3.0.0(1 year, 10 months ago)

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.

Wombat is a Ruby gem that makes it easy to scrape websites and extract structured data from HTML pages. It is built on top of Nokogiri, a popular Ruby gem for parsing and searching HTML and XML documents, and it provides a simple and intuitive API for defining and running web scraping operations.

One of the main features of Wombat is its ability to extract structured data from HTML pages using a simple, CSS-like syntax. It allows you to define a set of rules for extracting data from a page, and then automatically applies those rules to the page's HTML to extract the desired data. This makes it easy to extract data from even complex and dynamic pages, without having to write a lot of custom code.

In addition to its data extraction capabilities, Wombat also provides a variety of other features that can simplify the web scraping process. It can automatically follow links and scrape multiple pages, it can handle pagination and AJAX requests, and it can handle cookies and authentication. It also provides a built-in support for parallelism and queueing to speed up the scraping process.

Highlights


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/")
}
require 'wombat'

Wombat.crawl do
  base_url "https://www.github.com"
  path "/"

  headline xpath: "//h1"
  subheading css: "p.alt-lead"

  what_is({ css: ".one-fourth h4" }, :list)

  links do
    explore xpath: '/html/body/header/div/div/nav[1]/a[4]' do |e|
      e.gsub(/Explore/, "Love")
    end

    features css: '.nav-item-opensource'
    business css: '.nav-item-business'
  end
end
will result in:
{
  "headline"=>"How people build software",
  "subheading"=>"Millions of developers use GitHub to build personal projects, support their businesses, and work together on open source technologies.",
  "what_is"=>[
    "For everything you build",
    "A better way to work",
    "Millions of projects",
    "One platform, from start to finish"
  ],
  "links"=>{
    "explore"=>"Love",
    "features"=>"Open source",
    "business"=>"Business"
  }
}

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