roachvsscrapy
Roach is a complete web scraping toolkit for PHP. It is heavily inspired by the popular Scrapy package for Python.
Roach allows us to define spiders that crawl and scrape web documents. Roach isn’t just a simple crawler, but includes an entire pipeline to clean, persist and otherwise process extracted data as well.
Just like scrapy, Roach supports: - Middlewares - Item Pipelines - Extendibility through Plugins
It’s your all-in-one resource for web scraping in PHP.
Scrapy is an open-source Python library for web scraping. It allows developers to extract structured data from websites using a simple and consistent interface.
Scrapy provides:
- A built-in way to follow links and extract data from multiple pages (crawling)
- Handling common web scraping tasks such as logging in, handling cookies, and handling redirects.
Scrapy is built on top of the Twisted networking engine, which provides a non-blocking way to handle multiple requests at the same time, allowing Scrapy to efficiently scrape large websites.
It also comes with a built-in mechanism for handling common web scraping problems, such as:
- handling HTTP errors
- handling broken links
Scrapy also provide these features:
- Support for storing scraped data in various formats, such as CSV, JSON, and XML.
- Built-in support for selecting and extracting data using XPath or CSS selectors (through
parsel). - Built-in support for handling common web scraping problems (like deduplication and url filtering).
- Ability to easily extend its functionality using middlewares.
- Ability to easily extend output processing using pipelines.
Highlights
Example Use
<?php
use RoachPHP\Http\Response;
use RoachPHP\Spider\BasicSpider;
class RoachDocsSpider extends BasicSpider
{
/**
* @var string[]
*/
public array $startUrls = [
'https://roach-php.dev/docs/spiders'
];
public function parse(Response $response): \Generator
{
$title = $response->filter('h1')->text();
$subtitle = $response
->filter('main > div:nth-child(2) p:first-of-type')
->text();
yield $this->item([
'title' => $title,
'subtitle' => $subtitle,
]);
}
}