crawl4aivsphp-spider
Crawl4AI is an open-source AI-powered web crawling and data extraction library for Python. It uses large language models (LLMs) to intelligently extract structured data from web pages with minimal code. Unlike traditional scraping frameworks that rely on CSS selectors or XPath, Crawl4AI can understand page content semantically and extract data based on natural language descriptions of what you want.
Key features include:
- LLM-based extraction Define what data you want in plain English and Crawl4AI uses LLMs to find and extract it from the page content. Supports multiple LLM providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, and local models.
- Automatic crawling Built-in crawler with support for JavaScript rendering, parallel crawling, and session management.
- Structured output Returns data in structured formats (JSON, Pydantic models) making it easy to integrate into data pipelines.
- Markdown conversion Can convert web pages to clean markdown format, useful for feeding content to LLMs.
- Chunking strategies Multiple strategies for breaking down large pages into processable chunks for LLM extraction.
- Async support Built on async Python for efficient concurrent crawling and extraction.
Crawl4AI is particularly useful for scraping unstructured content where writing traditional CSS/XPath selectors would be tedious or fragile. It excels at content extraction, article parsing, and data mining from diverse page layouts.
php-spider is a PHP library for web crawling and scraping. It allows developers to easily navigate and extract data from websites by simulating a web browser's behavior.
- supports two traversal algorithms: breadth-first and depth-first
- supports crawl depth limiting, queue size limiting and max downloads limiting
- supports adding custom URI discovery logic, based on XPath, CSS selectors, or plain old PHP
- comes with a useful set of URI filters, such as Domain limiting
- supports custom URI filters, both prefetch (URI) and postfetch (Resource content)
- supports custom request handling logic
- supports Basic, Digest and NTLM HTTP authentication. See example.
- comes with a useful set of persistence handlers (memory, file)
- supports custom persistence handlers
- collects statistics about the crawl for reporting
- dispatches useful events, allowing developers to add even more custom behavior
- supports a politeness policy
This Spider does not support Javascript.
Highlights
ai-poweredasyncpopular
Example Use
```python
from crawl4ai import AsyncWebCrawler, CrawlerRunConfig
from crawl4ai.extraction_strategy import LLMExtractionStrategy
import asyncio
async def main():
# Basic crawling - get page as markdown
async with AsyncWebCrawler() as crawler:
result = await crawler.arun(url="https://example.com")
print(result.markdown) # clean markdown content
# AI-powered extraction with structured output
strategy = LLMExtractionStrategy(
instruction="Extract all product names and prices from this page",
)
config = CrawlerRunConfig(extraction_strategy=strategy)
async with AsyncWebCrawler() as crawler:
result = await crawler.arun(
url="https://example.com/products",
config=config,
)
print(result.extracted_content) # structured JSON output
asyncio.run(main())
```
```php
use Example\StatsHandler;
use VDB\Spider\Discoverer\XPathExpressionDiscoverer;
use Symfony\Contracts\EventDispatcher\Event;
use VDB\Spider\Event\SpiderEvents;
use VDB\Spider\Spider;
require_once('example_complex_bootstrap.php');
// Create Spider
$spider = new Spider('http://dmoztools.net');
// Add a URI discoverer. Without it, the spider does nothing. In this case, we want tags from a certain
$spider->getDiscovererSet()->set(new XPathExpressionDiscoverer("//div[@id='catalogs']//a"));
// Set some sane options for this example. In this case, we only get the first 10 items from the start page.
$spider->getDiscovererSet()->maxDepth = 1;
$spider->getQueueManager()->maxQueueSize = 10;
// Let's add something to enable us to stop the script
$spider->getDispatcher()->addListener(
SpiderEvents::SPIDER_CRAWL_USER_STOPPED,
function (Event $event) {
echo "\nCrawl aborted by user.\n";
exit();
}
);
// Add a listener to collect stats to the Spider and the QueueMananger.
// There are more components that dispatch events you can use.
$statsHandler = new StatsHandler();
$spider->getQueueManager()->getDispatcher()->addSubscriber($statsHandler);
$spider->getDispatcher()->addSubscriber($statsHandler);
// Execute crawl
$spider->crawl();
// Build a report
echo "\n ENQUEUED: " . count($statsHandler->getQueued());
echo "\n SKIPPED: " . count($statsHandler->getFiltered());
echo "\n FAILED: " . count($statsHandler->getFailed());
echo "\n PERSISTED: " . count($statsHandler->getPersisted());
// Finally we could do some processing on the downloaded resources
// In this example, we will echo the title of all resources
echo "\n\nDOWNLOADED RESOURCES: ";
foreach ($spider->getDownloader()->getPersistenceHandler() as $resource) {
echo "\n - " . $resource->getCrawler()->filterXpath('//title')->text();
}
```
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