crulvstyphoeus
crul is a R library for sending HTTP requests and web scraping. It is designed to be simple and easy to use, while still providing powerful functionality for working with HTTP requests and scraping web pages.
One of the main features of crul is its intuitive and easy-to-use syntax for sending HTTP requests. It allows you to easily specify the HTTP method, headers, and body of a request, and also provides a simple way to handle the response.
crul also has the ability to handle different types of requests and responses, including GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, and PATCH. It also support for handling redirects, cookies, and authentication.
Another feature of crul is its support for web scraping. The library provides a simple and efficient way to extract data from web pages, using a syntax similar to that of the XML and httr libraries. It also allows to easily filter the extracted data based on a specific criteria.
crul also supports parallel scraping, which allows to make multiple requests at the same time, thus speeding up the scraping process.
In addition to these features, crul has a good compatibility with other R packages such as tidyverse and purrr which facilitates the manipulation of the data obtained after scraping.
Typhoeus is a Ruby library that allows you to make parallel HTTP requests, which can greatly speed up the process of making multiple requests to different servers. It is built on top of the C library libcurl, which is known for its high performance and reliability.
One of the main features of Typhoeus is its ability to make parallel requests. This means that it can send multiple requests at the same time, and wait for all of them to finish before returning the results. This can greatly reduce the time it takes to make multiple requests, as it eliminates the need to wait for each request to complete before sending the next one.
In addition to its parallelism feature, Typhoeus also provides a convenient and easy-to-use Ruby interface for making HTTP requests. It supports all of the common HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc.) and allows you to set various request options, such as headers, timeouts, and authentication. It also supports streaming responses, which allows you to process large responses piece by piece, rather than loading the entire response into memory at once.
Typhoeus is also supports HTTP/2 protocol which provides faster load times and reduced network usage. It also supports streaming which is an essential feature for large data transfer.
Typhoeus is well-documented, actively maintained, and has a large and active community of users. It is widely used in the Ruby ecosystem and is a popular choice for building high-performance web scraping and data-gathering applications.
Note that Typhoeus can also be used as an adapter in popular alternative package Faraday.
Highlights
Example Use
library(crul)
# Sending a GET request to a website
response <- HttpClient$new("https://www.example.com")$get()
# Sending a POST request to a website
request_body <- list(param1 = "value1", param2 = "value2")
response <- HttpClient$new("https://www.example.com")$post(body = request_body)
# Extracting the status code and body of the response
status_code <- response$status_code()
body <- response$body()
# crul also allows easy asynchronous requests:
urls <- c("https://www.example1.com", "https://www.example2.com", "https://www.example3.com")
# Creating a list of request objects from urls
requests <- lapply(urls, function(url) {
HttpClient$new(url)$get()
})
# Sending the requests asynchronously
responses <- async(requests)
# Extracting the status code and body of the responses
status_codes <- lapply(responses, function(response) response$status_code())
bodies <- lapply(responses, function(response) response$body())
# GET request
Typhoeus.get("www.example.com")
# POST request
Typhoeus.post("www.example.com/posts", body: { title: "test post", content: "this is my test"})
# make parallel requests:
# hydra is a request queue manager
hydra = Typhoeus::Hydra.hydra
# create request object
first_request = Typhoeus::Request.new("http://example.com/posts/1")
# add complete callbacks
first_request.on_complete do |response|
# callbacks can queue new requests
third_url = response.body
third_request = Typhoeus::Request.new(third_url)
hydra.queue third_request
end
second_request = Typhoeus::Request.new("http://example.com/posts/2")
# queue requests:
hydra.queue first_request
hydra.queue second_request
hydra.run # this is a blocking call that returns once all requests are complete