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dataflowkitvsgocrawl

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Feb 09 2017 2024-06-25(20 days ago)
2,029 2 6 BSD-3-Clause
Nov 20 2016 58.1 thousand (month) (3 years ago)

Dataflow kit ("DFK") is a Web Scraping framework for Gophers. It extracts data from web pages, following the specified CSS Selectors. You can use it in many ways for data mining, data processing or archiving.

Web-scraping pipeline consists of 3 general components:

  • Downloading an HTML web-page. (Fetch Service)
  • Parsing an HTML page and retrieving data we're interested in (Parse Service)
  • Encoding parsed data to CSV, MS Excel, JSON, JSON Lines or XML format.

For fetching dataflowkit has several types of page fetchers:

  • Base fetcher uses standard golang http client to fetch pages as is. It works faster than Chrome fetcher. But Base fetcher cannot render dynamic javascript driven web pages.
  • Chrome fetcher is intended for rendering dynamic javascript based content. It sends requests to Chrome running in headless mode.

For parsing dataflowkit extracts data from downloaded web page following the rules listed in configuration JSON file. Extracted data is returned in CSV, MS Excel, JSON or XML format.

Some dataflowkit features:

  • Scraping of JavaScript generated pages;
  • Data extraction from paginated websites;
  • Processing infinite scrolled pages.
  • Sсraping of websites behind login form;
  • Cookies and sessions handling;
  • Following links and detailed pages processing;
  • Managing delays between requests per domain;
  • Following robots.txt directives;
  • Saving intermediate data in Diskv or Mongodb. Storage interface is flexible enough to add more storage types easily;
  • Encode results to CSV, MS Excel, JSON(Lines), XML formats;
  • Dataflow kit is fast. It takes about 4-6 seconds to fetch and then parse 50 pages.
  • Dataflow kit is suitable to process quite large volumes of data. Our tests show the time needed to parse appr. 4 millions of pages is about 7 hours.

Gocrawl is a polite, slim and concurrent web crawler library written in Go. It is designed to be simple and easy to use, while still providing a high degree of flexibility and control over the crawling process.

One of the key features of Gocrawl is its politeness, which means that it obeys the website's robots.txt file and respects the crawl-delay specified in the file. It also takes into account the website's last modified date, if any, to avoid recrawling the same page. This helps to reduce the load on the website and prevent any potential legal issues. Gocrawl is also highly concurrent, which allows it to efficiently crawl large numbers of pages in parallel. This helps to speed up the crawling process and reduce the time required to complete the task.

The library also offers a high degree of flexibility in customizing the crawling process. It allows you to specify custom callbacks and handlers for handling different types of pages, such as error pages, redirects, and so on. This allows you to handle and process the pages as per your requirement. Additionally, Gocrawl provides various functionalities such as support for cookies, user-agent, auto-detection of links, and auto-detection of sitemaps.

Example Use


Dataflowkit uses JSON configuration like:
{
  "name": "collection",
  "request": {
      "url": "https://example.com"
  },
  "fields": [
      {
          "name": "Title",
          "selector": ".product-container a",
          "extractor": {
              "types": [
                  "text",
                  "href"
              ],
              "filters": [
                  "trim",
                  "lowerCase"
              ],
              "params": {
                  "includeIfEmpty": false
              }
          }
      },
      {
          "name": "Image",
          "selector": "#product-container img",
          "extractor": {
              "types": [
                  "alt",
                  "src",
                  "width",
                  "height"
              ],
              "filters": [
                  "trim",
                  "upperCase"
              ]
          }
      },
      {
          "name": "Buyinfo",
          "selector": ".buy-info",
          "extractor": {
              "types": [
                  "text"
              ],
              "params": {
                  "includeIfEmpty": false
              }
          }
      }
  ],
  "paginator": {
      "selector": ".next",
      "attr": "href",
      "maxPages": 3
  },
  "format": "json",
  "fetcherType": "chrome",
  "paginateResults": false
}
which is then ingested through CLI command.
// Only enqueue the root and paths beginning with an "a"
var rxOk = regexp.MustCompile(`http://duckduckgo\.com(/a.*)?$`)

// Create the Extender implementation, based on the gocrawl-provided DefaultExtender,
// because we don't want/need to override all methods.
type ExampleExtender struct {
    gocrawl.DefaultExtender // Will use the default implementation of all but Visit and Filter
}

// Override Visit for our need.
func (x *ExampleExtender) Visit(ctx *gocrawl.URLContext, res *http.Response, doc *goquery.Document) (interface{}, bool) {
    // Use the goquery document or res.Body to manipulate the data
    // ...

    // Return nil and true - let gocrawl find the links
    return nil, true
}

// Override Filter for our need.
func (x *ExampleExtender) Filter(ctx *gocrawl.URLContext, isVisited bool) bool {
    return !isVisited && rxOk.MatchString(ctx.NormalizedURL().String())
}

func ExampleCrawl() {
    // Set custom options
    opts := gocrawl.NewOptions(new(ExampleExtender))

    // should always set your robot name so that it looks for the most
    // specific rules possible in robots.txt.
    opts.RobotUserAgent = "Example"
    // and reflect that in the user-agent string used to make requests,
    // ideally with a link so site owners can contact you if there's an issue
    opts.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Example/1.0; +http://example.com)"

    opts.CrawlDelay = 1 * time.Second
    opts.LogFlags = gocrawl.LogAll

    // Play nice with ddgo when running the test!
    opts.MaxVisits = 2

    // Create crawler and start at root of duckduckgo
    c := gocrawl.NewCrawlerWithOptions(opts)
    c.Run("https://duckduckgo.com/")

    // Remove "x" before Output: to activate the example (will run on go test)

    // xOutput: voluntarily fail to see log output
}

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