ferretvsralger
Ferret is a web scraping system. It aims to simplify data extraction from the web for UI testing, machine learning, analytics and more. ferret allows users to focus on the data. It abstracts away the technical details and complexity of underlying technologies using its own declarative language. It is extremely portable, extensible, and fast.
Features
- Declarative language
- Support of both static and dynamic web pages
- Embeddable
- Extensible
Ferret is always implemented in Python through pyfer
ralger is a small web scraping framework for R based on rvest and xml2.
It's goal to simplify basic web scraping and it provides a convenient and easy to use API.
It offers functions for retrieving pages, parsing HTML using CSS selectors, automatic table parsing and auto link, title, image and paragraph extraction.
Example Use
// Example scraper for Google in Ferret:
LET google = DOCUMENT("https://www.google.com/", {
driver: "cdp",
userAgent: "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/76.0.3809.87 Safari/537.36"
})
HOVER(google, 'input[name="q"]')
WAIT(RAND(100))
INPUT(google, 'input[name="q"]', @criteria, 30)
WAIT(RAND(100))
CLICK(google, 'input[name="btnK"]')
WAITFOR EVENT "navigation" IN google
WAIT_ELEMENT(google, "#res")
LET results = ELEMENTS(google, X("//*[text() = 'Search Results']/following-sibling::*/*"))
FOR el IN results
RETURN {
title: INNER_TEXT(el, 'h3')?,
description: INNER_TEXT(el, X("//em/parent::*")),
url: ELEMENT(el, 'a')?.attributes.href
}
library("ralger")
url <- "http://www.shanghairanking.com/rankings/arwu/2021"
# retrieve HTML and select elements using CSS selectors:
best_uni <- scrap(link = url, node = "a span", clean = TRUE)
head(best_uni, 5)
#> [1] "Harvard University"
#> [2] "Stanford University"
#> [3] "University of Cambridge"
#> [4] "Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)"
#> [5] "University of California, Berkeley"
# ralger can also parse HTML attributes
attributes <- attribute_scrap(
link = "https://ropensci.org/",
node = "a", # the a tag
attr = "class" # getting the class attribute
)
head(attributes, 10) # NA values are a tags without a class attribute
#> [1] "navbar-brand logo" "nav-link" NA
#> [4] NA NA "nav-link"
#> [7] NA "nav-link" NA
#> [10] NA
#
# ralger can automatically scrape tables:
data <- table_scrap(link ="https://www.boxofficemojo.com/chart/top_lifetime_gross/?area=XWW")
head(data)
#> # A tibble: 6 × 4
#> Rank Title `Lifetime Gross` Year
#> <int> <chr> <chr> <int>
#> 1 1 Avatar $2,847,397,339 2009
#> 2 2 Avengers: Endgame $2,797,501,328 2019
#> 3 3 Titanic $2,201,647,264 1997
#> 4 4 Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens $2,069,521,700 2015
#> 5 5 Avengers: Infinity War $2,048,359,754 2018
#> 6 6 Spider-Man: No Way Home $1,901,216,740 2021