goqueryvsrvest
goquery brings a syntax and a set of features similar to jQuery to the Go language. goquery is a popular and easy-to-use library for Go that allows you to use a CSS selector-like syntax to select elements from an HTML document.
It is based on Go's net/html package and the CSS Selector library cascadia. Since the net/html parser returns nodes, and not a full-featured DOM tree, jQuery's stateful manipulation functions (like height(), css(), detach()) have been left off.
Also, because the net/html parser requires UTF-8 encoding, so does goquery: it is the caller's responsibility to ensure that the source document provides UTF-8 encoded HTML. See the wiki for various options to do this. Syntax-wise, it is as close as possible to jQuery, with the same function names when possible, and that warm and fuzzy chainable interface. jQuery being the ultra-popular library that it is, I felt that writing a similar HTML-manipulating library was better to follow its API than to start anew (in the same spirit as Go's fmt package), even though some of its methods are less than intuitive (looking at you, index()...).
goquery can download HTML by itself (using built-in http client) though it's not recommended for web scraping as it's likely to be blocked.
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
package main
import (
"fmt"
"github.com/PuerkitoBio/goquery"
)
func main() {
// Use goquery.NewDocument to load an HTML document
// This can load from URL
doc, err := goquery.NewDocument("http://example.com")
// or HTML string:
doc, err := goquery.NewDocumentFromReader("some html")
if err != nil {
fmt.Println("Error:", err)
return
}
// Use the Selection.Find method to select elements from the document
doc.Find("a").Each(func(i int, s *goquery.Selection) {
// Use the Selection.Text method to get the text of the element
fmt.Println(s.Text())
// Use the Selection.Attr method to get the value of an attribute
fmt.Println(s.Attr("href"))
})
}
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"