cheeriovsdomcrawler
cheerio is a popular JavaScript library that allows you to interact with and manipulate HTML and XML documents in a similar way to how you would with jQuery in a browser. It is a fast, flexible, and lean implementation of core jQuery designed specifically for the server.
One of the main benefits of using cheerio is that it allows you to use jQuery-like syntax to navigate and m anipulate the Document Object Model (DOM) of an HTML or XML document, making it easy to work with.
cheerio supports CSS selectors though not XPath.
DOMCrawler library is part of the Symfony Components project and provides an easy way to traverse and manipulate HTML and XML documents using the Document Object Model (DOM) in PHP.
DOMcrawler supports both CSS selectors and XPath for HTML document parsing and is one the most popular HTML parsing tools used in web scraping with PHP.
Example Use
const cheerio = require('cheerio');
const $ = cheerio.load('<html><head><title>My title</title></head><body><h1 class='name'>Hello World!</h1></body></html>');
// use css selectors
console.log($('title').text()); // My title
console.log($('.name').text()); // Hello World!
// select multiple elements
const $ = cheerio.load('<html><body><ul><li>item 1</li><li>item 2</li></ul></body></html>');
$('li').each(function(i, elem) {
console.log($(this).text());
});
// modify elements
const $ = cheerio.load('<html><body><h1>Hello World!</h1></body></html>');
$('h1').text('Hello, Cheerio!');
console.log($.html());
use Symfony\Component\DomCrawler\Crawler;
$html = '<html><body><h1 class="title">Hello World</h1></body></html>';
$crawler = new Crawler($html);
// Find all elements using CSS selectors
$elements = $crawler->filter('.title')i;
// or XPath
$elements = $crawler->filterXPath('//h1');
// Print the text content of the elements
foreach ($elements as $element) {
echo $element->textContent;
}