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node-crawlervsscrapy

MIT 28 6 6,699
16.3 thousand (month) Sep 10 2012 2.0.2(3 months ago)
52,353 30 667 BSD-3-Clause
Jul 26 2019 1.7 million (month) 2.11.2(5 months ago)

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

Scrapy is an open-source Python library for web scraping. It allows developers to extract structured data from websites using a simple and consistent interface.

Scrapy provides:

  • A built-in way to follow links and extract data from multiple pages (crawling)
  • Handling common web scraping tasks such as logging in, handling cookies, and handling redirects.

Scrapy is built on top of the Twisted networking engine, which provides a non-blocking way to handle multiple requests at the same time, allowing Scrapy to efficiently scrape large websites.

It also comes with a built-in mechanism for handling common web scraping problems, such as:

  • handling HTTP errors
  • handling broken links

Scrapy also provide these features:

  • Support for storing scraped data in various formats, such as CSV, JSON, and XML.
  • Built-in support for selecting and extracting data using XPath or CSS selectors (through parsel).
  • Built-in support for handling common web scraping problems (like deduplication and url filtering).
  • Ability to easily extend its functionality using middlewares.
  • Ability to easily extend output processing using pipelines.

Highlights


popularcss-selectorsxpath-selectorscommunity-toolsoutput-pipelinesmiddlewaresasyncproductionlarge-scale

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>'
}]);

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