node-crawlervspanther
node-crawler is a popular web scraping library for Node.js that allows you to easily navigate and extract data from websites. It has a simple API and supports concurrency, making it efficient for scraping large numbers of pages.
Features:
- Server-side DOM & automatic jQuery insertion with Cheerio (default) or JSDOM,
- Configurable pool size and retries,
- Control rate limit,
- Priority queue of requests,
- forceUTF8 mode to let crawler deal for you with charset detection and conversion,
- Compatible with 4.x or newer version.
- Http2 support
- Proxy support
Panther is a convenient standalone library to scrape websites and to run end-to-end tests using real browsers.
Panther is super powerful. It leverages the W3C's WebDriver protocol to drive native web browsers such as Google Chrome and Firefox.
Panther is very easy to use, because it implements Symfony's popular BrowserKit and DomCrawler APIs, and contains all the features you need to test your apps. It will sound familiar if you have ever created a functional test for a Symfony app: as the API is exactly the same! Keep in mind that Panther can be used in every PHP project, as it is a standalone library.
Panther automatically finds your local installation of Chrome or Firefox and launches them, so you don't need to install anything else on your computer, a Selenium server is not needed!
In test mode, Panther automatically starts your application using the PHP built-in web-server. You can focus on writing your tests or web-scraping scenario and Panther will take care of everything else.
Features:
- executes the JavaScript code contained in webpages
- supports everything that Chrome (or Firefox) implements
- allows taking screenshots
- can wait for asynchronously loaded elements to show up
- lets you run your own JS code or XPath queries in the context of the loaded page
- supports custom Selenium server installations
- supports remote browser testing services including SauceLabs and BrowserStack
Example Use
const Crawler = require('crawler');
const c = new Crawler({
maxConnections: 10,
// This will be called for each crawled page
callback: (error, res, done) => {
if (error) {
console.log(error);
} else {
const $ = res.$;
// $ is Cheerio by default
//a lean implementation of core jQuery designed specifically for the server
console.log($('title').text());
}
done();
}
});
// Queue just one URL, with default callback
c.queue('http://www.amazon.com');
// Queue a list of URLs
c.queue(['http://www.google.com/','http://www.yahoo.com']);
// Queue URLs with custom callbacks & parameters
c.queue([{
uri: 'http://parishackers.org/',
jQuery: false,
// The global callback won't be called
callback: (error, res, done) => {
if (error) {
console.log(error);
} else {
console.log('Grabbed', res.body.length, 'bytes');
}
done();
}
}]);
// Queue some HTML code directly without grabbing (mostly for tests)
c.queue([{
html: '<p>This is a <strong>test</strong></p>'
}]);
<?php
use Symfony\Component\Panther\Client;
require __DIR__.'/vendor/autoload.php'; // Composer's autoloader
$client = Client::createChromeClient();
// Or, if you care about the open web and prefer to use Firefox
$client = Client::createFirefoxClient();
$client->request('GET', 'https://api-platform.com'); // Yes, this website is 100% written in JavaScript
$client->clickLink('Get started');
// Wait for an element to be present in the DOM (even if hidden)
$crawler = $client->waitFor('#installing-the-framework');
// Alternatively, wait for an element to be visible
$crawler = $client->waitForVisibility('#installing-the-framework');
echo $crawler->filter('#installing-the-framework')->text();
$client->takeScreenshot('screen.png'); // Yeah, screenshot!