panthervsautoscraper
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
Autoscraper project is made for automatic web scraping to make scraping easy. It gets a url or the html content of a web page and a list of sample data which we want to scrape from that page. This data can be text, url or any html tag value of that page. It learns the scraping rules and returns the similar elements. Then you can use this learned object with new urls to get similar content or the exact same element of those new pages.
Autoscraper is minimalistic and auto-generative approach to web scraping. For example, here's a scraper that finds all titles on a stackoverflow.com page:
from autoscraper import AutoScraper
url = 'https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2081586/web-scraping-with-python'
# We can add one or multiple candidates here.
# You can also put urls here to retrieve urls.
wanted_list = ["What are metaclasses in Python?"]
scraper = AutoScraper()
result = scraper.build(url, wanted_list)
print(result)
Highlights
Example Use
<?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!