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domcrawlervsrequests-html

MIT - 8 3,961
167.4 thousand (month) Sep 26 2011 v7.1.5(a month ago)
13,726 2 228 MIT
Feb 25 2018 1.1 million (month) 0.10.0(5 years ago)

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.

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

Example Use


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;
}
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)

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