rvestvskimurai
rvest is a popular R library for web scraping and parsing HTML and XML documents. It is built on top of the xml2 and httr libraries and provides a simple and consistent API for interacting with web pages.
One of the main advantages of using rvest is its simplicity and ease of use. It provides a number of functions that make it easy to extract information from web pages, even for those who are not familiar with web scraping. The html_nodes and html_node functions allow you to select elements from an HTML document using CSS selectors, similar to how you would select elements in JavaScript.
rvest also provides functions for interacting with forms, including html_form, set_values, and submit_form functions. These functions make it easy to navigate through forms and submit data to the server, which can be useful when scraping sites that require authentication or when interacting with dynamic web pages.
rvest also provides functions for parsing XML documents. It includes xml_nodes and xml_node functions, which also use CSS selectors to select elements from an XML document, as well as xml_attrs and xml_attr functions to extract attributes from elements.
Another advantage of rvest is that it provides a way to handle cookies, so you can keep the session alive while scraping a website, and also you can handle redirections with handle_redirects
Kimurai is a modern web scraping framework for Ruby, inspired by Python's Scrapy. It provides a structured approach to building web scrapers with built-in support for multiple browser engines, session management, and data pipelines.
Key features include:
- Multiple engine support Can use different backends depending on the scraping needs: Mechanize for simple HTTP requests, Selenium with headless Chrome/Firefox for JavaScript-rendered pages, and Poltergeist (PhantomJS) for lightweight rendering.
- Scrapy-like architecture Follows the spider pattern: define a spider class with start URLs and parsing methods, and the framework handles crawling, scheduling, and data collection.
- Built-in data pipelines Save scraped data to JSON, CSV, or custom formats with configurable output pipelines.
- Session management Maintains browser sessions with automatic cookie handling and configurable delays between requests.
- Request scheduling Built-in request queue with configurable concurrency, delays, and retry logic.
- CLI tools Command-line tools for generating new spiders, running individual spiders, and managing scraping projects.
Kimurai is the closest Ruby equivalent to Scrapy. It's well-suited for structured scraping projects that need organization, multiple spiders, and data pipeline processing.
Note: Kimurai has not seen active development recently, but it remains a useful framework for Ruby scraping projects and is included as the most complete Ruby scraping framework available.