Skip to content

dataflowkitvsroach

BSD-3-Clause 4 3 655
Feb 09 2017 2024-08-30(11 days ago)
1,347 2 24 MIT
Dec 27 2021 310 (month) v3.2.0(5 months 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.

Roach is a complete web scraping toolkit for PHP. It is heavily inspired by the popular Scrapy package for Python.

Roach allows us to define spiders that crawl and scrape web documents. Roach isn’t just a simple crawler, but includes an entire pipeline to clean, persist and otherwise process extracted data as well.

Just like scrapy, Roach supports: - Middlewares - Item Pipelines - Extendibility through Plugins

It’s your all-in-one resource for web scraping in PHP.

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.
<?php

use RoachPHP\Http\Response;
use RoachPHP\Spider\BasicSpider;

class RoachDocsSpider extends BasicSpider
{
    /**
     * @var string[]
     */
    public array $startUrls = [
        'https://roach-php.dev/docs/spiders'
    ];

    public function parse(Response $response): \Generator
    {
        $title = $response->filter('h1')->text();

        $subtitle = $response
            ->filter('main > div:nth-child(2) p:first-of-type')
            ->text();

        yield $this->item([
            'title' => $title,
            'subtitle' => $subtitle,
        ]);
    }
}

Alternatives / Similar


Was this page helpful?