photonvsscrapy
Photon is a Python library for web scraping. It is designed to be lightweight and fast, and can be used to extract data from websites and web pages. Photon can extract the following data while crawling:
- URLs (in-scope & out-of-scope)
- URLs with parameters (example.com/gallery.php?id=2)
- Intel (emails, social media accounts, amazon buckets etc.)
- Files (pdf, png, xml etc.)
- Secret keys (auth/API keys & hashes)
- JavaScript files & Endpoints present in them
- Strings matching custom regex pattern
- Subdomains & DNS related data
The extracted information is saved in an organized manner or can be exported as json.
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
from photon import Photon
#Create a new Photon instance
ph = Photon()
#Extract data from a specific element of the website
url = "https://www.example.com"
selector = "div.main"
data = ph.get_data(url, selector)
#Print the extracted data
print(data)
#Extract data from multiple websites asynchronously
urls = ["https://www.example1.com", "https://www.example2.com"]
data = ph.get_data_async(urls)