panthervsdude
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
Dude (dude uncomplicated data extraction) is a very simple framework for writing web scrapers using Python decorators. The design, inspired by Flask, was to easily build a web scraper in just a few lines of code. Dude has an easy-to-learn syntax.
The simplest web scraper will look like this:
from dude import select
@select(css="a")
def get_link(element):
return {"url": element.get_attribute("href")}
dude supports multiple parser backends:
- playwright
- lxml
- parsel
- beautifulsoup
- pyppeteer
- selenium
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!
from dude import select
"""
This example demonstrates how to use Parsel + async HTTPX
To access an attribute, use:
selector.attrib["href"]
You can also access an attribute using the ::attr(name) pseudo-element, for example "a::attr(href)", then:
selector.get()
To get the text, use ::text pseudo-element, then:
selector.get()
"""
@select(css="a.url", priority=2)
async def result_url(selector):
return {"url": selector.attrib["href"]}
# Option to get url using ::attr(name) pseudo-element
@select(css="a.url::attr(href)", priority=2)
async def result_url2(selector):
return {"url2": selector.get()}
@select(css=".title::text", priority=1)
async def result_title(selector):
return {"title": selector.get()}
@select(css=".description::text", priority=0)
async def result_description(selector):
return {"description": selector.get()}
if __name__ == "__main__":
import dude
dude.run(urls=["https://dude.ron.sh"], parser="parsel")