Skip to content

gocrawlvsrvest

BSD-3-Clause 6 2 2,037
58.1 thousand (month) Nov 20 2016 (3 years ago)
1,494 1 33 MIT
Nov 22 2014 663.8 thousand (month) 1.0.4(2 years ago)

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.

rvest is a popular R library for web scraping and parsing HTML and XML documents. It is built on top of the xml2 and httr libraries and provides a simple and consistent API for interacting with web pages.

One of the main advantages of using rvest is its simplicity and ease of use. It provides a number of functions that make it easy to extract information from web pages, even for those who are not familiar with web scraping. The html_nodes and html_node functions allow you to select elements from an HTML document using CSS selectors, similar to how you would select elements in JavaScript.

rvest also provides functions for interacting with forms, including html_form, set_values, and submit_form functions. These functions make it easy to navigate through forms and submit data to the server, which can be useful when scraping sites that require authentication or when interacting with dynamic web pages.

rvest also provides functions for parsing XML documents. It includes xml_nodes and xml_node functions, which also use CSS selectors to select elements from an XML document, as well as xml_attrs and xml_attr functions to extract attributes from elements.

Another advantage of rvest is that it provides a way to handle cookies, so you can keep the session alive while scraping a website, and also you can handle redirections with handle_redirects

Example Use


// 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
}
library("rvest")

# Rvest can use basic HTTP client to download remote HTML:
tree <- read_html("http://webscraping.fyi/lib/r/rvest")
# or read from string:
tree <- read_html('
<div class="products">
  <a href="/product/1">Cat Food</a>
  <a href="/product/2">Dog Food</a>
</div>
')

# to parse HTML trees with rvest we use r pipes (the %>% symbol) and html_element function:
# we can use css selectors:
print(tree %>% html_element(".products>a") %>% html_text())
# "[1] "\nCat Food\nDog Food\n""

# or XPath:
print(tree %>% html_element(xpath="//div[@class='products']/a") %>% html_text())
# "[1] "\nCat Food\nDog Food\n""

# Additionally rvest offers many quality of life functions:
# html_text2 - removes trailing and leading spaces and joins values
print(tree %>% html_element("div") %>% html_text2())
# "[1] "Cat Food Dog Food""

# html_attr - selects element's attribute:
print(tree %>% html_element("div") %>% html_attr('class'))
# "products"

Alternatives / Similar


Was this page helpful?