axios is a popular JavaScript library that allows you to make HTTP requests from a Node.js environment.
It is a promise-based library that works in both the browser and Node.js.
It is similar to the Fetch API, but with a more powerful feature set and better browser compatibility.
One of the main benefits of using axios is that it automatically transforms the response data into a JSON object,
making it easy to work with.
Axios is known for user-friendly API and support for asynchronous async/await syntax making it very accessible in web scraping.
Wreck is an HTTP client library for Node.js.
It provides a simple, consistent API for making HTTP requests, including support for both the client and server side of an HTTP transaction.
Wreck is a very minimal but stable as it's part of Hapi web framework project.
For web scraping, it doesn't offer required features like proxy configuration or http2 support so it's not recommended.
```javascript
// axios can be used with promises:
axios.get('http://httpbin.org/json')
.then(response => {
console.log(response.data);
})
.catch(error => {
console.log(error);
});
// or async await syntax:
var resp = await axios.get('http://httpbin.org/json');
console.log(resp.data);
// to make requests concurrently Promise.all function can be used:
const results = await Promise.all([
axios.get('http://httpbin.org/html'),
axios.get('http://httpbin.org/html'),
axios.get('http://httpbin.org/html'),
])
// axios also supports other type of requests like POST and even automatically serialize them:
await axios.post('http://httpbin.org/post', {'query': 'hello world'});
// or formdata
const data = {name: 'John Doe', email: 'johndoe@example.com'};
await axios.post('https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/users',
querystring.stringify(data),
{
headers: {
'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'
}
}
);
// default values like headers can be configured globally
axios.defaults.headers.common['User-Agent'] = 'webscraping.fyi';
// or for session instance:
const instance = axios.create({
headers: {"User-Agent": "webscraping.fyi"},
})
```
```javascript
const Wreck = require('wreck');
// get request
Wreck.get('http://example.com', (err, res, payload) => {
if (err) {
throw err;
}
console.log(payload.toString());
});
// post request
const options = {
headers: { 'content-type': 'application/json' },
payload: JSON.stringify({ name: 'John Doe' })
};
Wreck.post('http://example.com', options, (err, res, payload) => {
if (err) {
throw err;
}
console.log(payload.toString());
});
```