scrapyvswombat
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.
Wombat is a Ruby gem that makes it easy to scrape websites and extract structured data from HTML pages. It is built on top of Nokogiri, a popular Ruby gem for parsing and searching HTML and XML documents, and it provides a simple and intuitive API for defining and running web scraping operations.
One of the main features of Wombat is its ability to extract structured data from HTML pages using a simple, CSS-like syntax. It allows you to define a set of rules for extracting data from a page, and then automatically applies those rules to the page's HTML to extract the desired data. This makes it easy to extract data from even complex and dynamic pages, without having to write a lot of custom code.
In addition to its data extraction capabilities, Wombat also provides a variety of other features that can simplify the web scraping process. It can automatically follow links and scrape multiple pages, it can handle pagination and AJAX requests, and it can handle cookies and authentication. It also provides a built-in support for parallelism and queueing to speed up the scraping process.
Highlights
Example Use
require 'wombat'
Wombat.crawl do
base_url "https://www.github.com"
path "/"
headline xpath: "//h1"
subheading css: "p.alt-lead"
what_is({ css: ".one-fourth h4" }, :list)
links do
explore xpath: '/html/body/header/div/div/nav[1]/a[4]' do |e|
e.gsub(/Explore/, "Love")
end
features css: '.nav-item-opensource'
business css: '.nav-item-business'
end
end
{
"headline"=>"How people build software",
"subheading"=>"Millions of developers use GitHub to build personal projects, support their businesses, and work together on open source technologies.",
"what_is"=>[
"For everything you build",
"A better way to work",
"Millions of projects",
"One platform, from start to finish"
],
"links"=>{
"explore"=>"Love",
"features"=>"Open source",
"business"=>"Business"
}
}