Crawlee is a free web scraping & browser
automation library fitting for composing Node.js (and Python) crawlers.
Tag: Node.js
Lately I needed to scrape some data that are dynamically loaded by “Load more” button. A website JavaScript invokes XHR (or Ajax request) to fetch a next data portion. So, the need was to re-run those XHR with some POST parameters as variables.
So, how to make it in Node.js?
Today, I got in touch with the Node.js [and Python] bots garden/zoo providing modern bots with different kinds of browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Headless/not headless) using different automation frameworks (Puppeteer, Selenium, Playwright) in several programming languages.
Recently we’ve got a tricky website of dynamic content to scrape. The data are loaded thru XHRs into each part of the DOM (HTML markup). So, the task was to develop an effective scraper that does async while using reasonable CPU recourses.
What is MERN?
The MERN stack is a set of frameworks and tools used for developing a software product. They are very specifically chosen to work together in creating a well-functioning software (see a MERN app code at the post bottom).
node.exe index.js > scrape.log 2>&1
When executing file index.js we redirect all the console.log() output from console into a file scrape.log .
let table = $('table');
if ($(table).has('br')) {
$("br").replaceWith(" ");
}
In the previous post we shared how to disguise Selenium Chrome automation against Fingerprint checks. In this post we share the Puppeteer-extra with Stealth plugin to do the same. The test results are available as html files and screenshots.
When performing web scaping I first need to evaluate a site’s difficulty level. That is how difficult is it for the scrape procedures? Do its pages make extra XHR (Ajax) calls? Based on that I choose whether to use (1) Request scraper (eg. Cheerio) or (2) Browser automation scraper (eg. Puppeteer).
So, I’ve discovered an Apify Web Page Analyzer, a free scraper agent that analyses a target site and returns inclusive JSON data of the target web page. The presence of XHR (AJAX) helps me to decide what type of crawler to use for scraping that website.
As developers scrape data off the web, we use Node.js along with handy Cheerio scraper. When fetching .html() Cheerio parser returns the special symbols as HTML encoded entities, eg.:ä as ä ß as ß
Cheerio developer vindication of the parser action
(1) It’s not the job of a parser to preserve the original document.
(2) .html() returns an HTML representation of the parsed document, which doesn’t have to be equal to the original document.
source.