jsdomvssoup
jsdom is a pure JavaScript implementation of web standards, notably the WHATWG DOM and HTML standards, for use with Node.js. It simulates a browser environment in Node.js, allowing you to parse HTML, manipulate the DOM, and interact with web pages using the same APIs available in web browsers.
Key features for web scraping:
- Full DOM implementation Provides document.querySelector, document.querySelectorAll, and other standard DOM methods for traversing and manipulating parsed HTML.
- Browser-like environment Simulates window, document, navigator, and other browser globals, enabling code that was written for browsers to run in Node.js.
- JavaScript execution Can execute JavaScript embedded in HTML pages, including external scripts, making it possible to process pages that generate content dynamically (though much slower than a real browser).
- Standards-compliant parsing Uses the same HTML parsing algorithm as web browsers (the WHATWG HTML specification), ensuring accurate handling of malformed HTML.
- Cookie support Implements the tough-cookie library for cookie handling across requests.
For web scraping, jsdom is useful when you need more than simple CSS selector matching (what cheerio provides) but don't need a full browser. It's ideal for parsing complex HTML and running simple inline scripts without the overhead of Playwright or Puppeteer. However, for heavy JavaScript-rendered pages, a real browser automation tool is recommended.
soup is a Go library for parsing and querying HTML documents.
It provides a simple and intuitive interface for extracting information from HTML pages. It's inspired by popular Python web scraping
library BeautifulSoup and shares similar use API implementing functions like Find and FindAll.
soup can also use go's built-in http client to download HTML content.
Note that unlike beautifulsoup, soup does not support CSS selectors or XPath.
Highlights
Example Use
Product A
$10.99Product B
$24.99
</body>
`;
const dom = new JSDOM(html); const document = dom.window.document;
// Use standard DOM APIs to extract data
const products = document.querySelectorAll('.product');
products.forEach(product => {
const name = product.querySelector('h2').textContent;
const price = product.querySelector('.price').textContent;
console.log(${name}: ${price});
});
// Fetch and parse a remote page JSDOM.fromURL('https://example.com').then(dom => { const title = dom.window.document.title; console.log('Page title:', title); }); ```
```go package main
import ( "fmt" "log"
"github.com/anaskhan96/soup" )
func main() {
url := "https://www.bing.com/search?q=weather+Toronto"
# soup has basic HTTP client though it's not recommended for scraping: resp, err := soup.Get(url) if err != nil { log.Fatal(err) }
# create soup object from HTML doc := soup.HTMLParse(resp)
# html elements can be found using Find or FindStrict methods: # in this case find
# elements can be further searched for descendents: heading := grid.Find("div", "class", "wtr_titleCtrn").Find("div").Text() conditions := grid.Find("div", "class", "wtr_condition") primaryCondition := conditions.Find("div") secondaryCondition := primaryCondition.FindNextElementSibling() temp := primaryCondition.Find("div", "class", "wtr_condiTemp").Find("div").Text() others := primaryCondition.Find("div", "class", "wtr_condiAttribs").FindAll("div") caption := secondaryCondition.Find("div").Text()
fmt.Println("City Name : " + heading) fmt.Println("Temperature : " + temp + "˚C") for _, i := range others { fmt.Println(i.Text()) } fmt.Println(caption) } ```