jsdomvsrequests-html
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.
requests-html is a Python package that allows you to easily make HTTP requests and parse the HTML content of web pages. It is built on top of the popular requests package and uses the html parser from the lxml library, which makes it fast and efficient. This package is designed to provide a simple and convenient API for web scraping, and it supports features such as JavaScript rendering, CSS selectors, and form submissions.
It also offers a lot of functionalities such as cookie, session, and proxy support, which makes it an easy-to-use package for web scraping and web automation tasks.
In short requests-html offers:
- Full JavaScript support!
- CSS Selectors (a.k.a jQuery-style, thanks to PyQuery).
- XPath Selectors, for the faint of heart.
- Mocked user-agent (like a real web browser).
- Automatic following of redirects.
- Connection–pooling and cookie persistence.
- The Requests experience you know and love, with magical parsing abilities.
- Async Support
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); }); ```
```python from requests_html import HTMLSession
session = HTMLSession() r = session.get('https://www.example.com')
print the HTML content of the page
print(r.html.html)
use CSS selectors to find specific elements on the page
title = r.html.find('title', first=True) print(title.text) ```