panthervssplash
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
Splash is a javascript rendering service with an HTTP API. It's a lightweight browser with an HTTP API, implemented in Python 3 using Twisted and QT5.
It is built on top of the QtWebkit library and allows developers to interact with web pages in a headless mode, which means that the web pages are rendered in the background, without displaying them on the screen.
splash is particularly useful for web scraping and web testing tasks, as it allows developers to interact with web pages in a way that is very similar to how a human user would interact with the browser.
It also allows you to execute javascript and interact with web pages even if they use heavy javascript.
Unlike Selenium or Playwright, splash is powered by webkit embedded browser instead of a real browser like Chrome or Firefox. As a down-side splash requests are easy to detect and block when scraping websites with anti-scraping features.
One benefit of splash is that it seemlesly integrates with Scrapy.
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!
# once splash server is started it can be requested to render pages through
# HTTP requests:
import requests
url = "http://localhost:8050/render.html"
payload = {
'url': 'https://www.example.com',
'timeout': 30,
'wait': 2
}
response = requests.get(url, params=payload)
# Get the page HTML
print(response.text)