mechanizevsexcon
Mechanize is a Ruby library for automating interaction with websites. It automatically stores and sends cookies, follows redirects, and can submit forms — making it behave like a web browser without needing an actual browser engine.
Key features include:
- Automatic cookie management Stores cookies received from servers and sends them back on subsequent requests, maintaining session state across multiple pages.
- Form handling Can find, fill in, and submit HTML forms programmatically. Supports text inputs, selects, checkboxes, radio buttons, and file uploads.
- Link following Navigate through pages by clicking links using their text content, CSS selectors, or href patterns.
- History and back/forward Maintains a browsing history, allowing you to go back and forward through visited pages.
- HTTP authentication Supports basic and digest HTTP authentication.
- Proxy support Can route requests through HTTP proxies.
- Redirect handling Automatically follows HTTP redirects (configurable).
Mechanize is one of the oldest and most established web interaction libraries in Ruby. It is best suited for scraping traditional server-rendered websites with forms and multi-page workflows. For JavaScript-heavy sites, a browser automation tool like Selenium or Playwright is recommended instead.
Excon is a Ruby library for making HTTP requests. It is designed to be fast and efficient, and is often used as a building block for other Ruby libraries and frameworks.
One of the main features of Excon is its support for persistent connections, which allows it to reuse the same connection for multiple requests, reducing the overhead of establishing a new connection for each request.
Excon also supports streaming requests and responses, which allows you to read or write data to the server incrementally, without having to load the entire response into memory at once.