Scrapy Web Scraping Software



Scrapy is an open source web scraping framework in Python used to build web scrapers. It gives you all the tools you need to efficiently extract data from websites, process them, and store them in your preferred structure and format. One of its main advantages is that it’s built on top of a Twisted asynchronous networking framework. Who is this for: developers who are proficient at programming to build a web. Scrapy is really pleasant to work with. It hides most of the complexity of web crawling, letting you focus on the primary work of data extraction. Zyte (formerly Scrapinghub) provides a simple way to run your crawls and browse results, which is especially useful for larger projects with multiple developers. Jacob Perkins - StreamHacker.com.

Monday, February 01, 2021

A web scraper (also known as web crawler) is a tool or a piece of code that performs the process to extract data from web pages on the Internet. Various web scrapers have played an important role in the boom of big data and make it easy for people to scrape the data they need.

Among various web scrapers, open-source web scrapers allow users to code based on their source code or framework, and fuel a massive part to help scrape in a fast, simple but extensive way. We will walk through the top 10 open source web scrapers in 2020.

1. Scrapy

Language: Python

Scrapy is the most popular open-source and collaborative web scraping tool in Python. It helps to extract data efficiently from websites, processes them as you need, and store them in your preferred format(JSON, XML, and CSV). It’s built on top of a twisted asynchronous networking framework that can accept requests and process them faster. With Scrapy, you’ll be able to handle large web scraping projects in an efficient and flexible way.

Advantages:

  • Fast and powerful
  • Easy to use with detailed documentation
  • Ability to plug new functions without having to touch the core
  • A healthy community and abundant resources
  • Cloud environment to run the scrapers

2. Heritrix

Language: JAVA

Heritrix is a JAVA based open source scarper with high extensibility and designed for web archiving. It highly respects the robot.txt exclusion directives and Meta robot tags and collects data at a measured, adaptive pace unlikely to disrupt normal website activities. It provides a web-based user interface accessible with a web browser for operator control and monitoring of crawls.

Advantages:

  • Replaceable pluggable modules
  • Web-based interface
  • Respect to the robot.txt and Meta robot tags
  • Excellent extensibility

3. Web-Harvest

Language: JAVA

Web-Harvest is an open-source scraper written in Java. It can collect useful data from specified pages. In order to do that, it mainly leverages techniques and technologies such as XSLT, XQuery, and Regular Expressions to operate or filter content from HTML/XML based web sites. It could be easily supplemented by custom Java libraries to augment its extraction capabilities.

Advantages:

  • Powerful text and XML manipulation processors for data handling and control flow
  • The variable context for storing and using variables
  • Real scripting languages supported, which can be easily integrated within scraper configurations

4. MechanicalSoup

Language: Python

MechanicalSoup is a Python library designed to simulate the human’s interaction with websites when using a browser. It was built around Python giants Requests (for http sessions) and BeautifulSoup (for document navigation). It automatically stores and sends cookies, follows redirects, and follows links and submits forms. If you try to simulate human behaviors like waiting for a certain event or click certain items rather than just scraping data, MechanicalSoup is really useful.

Advantages:

  • Ability to simulate human behavior
  • Blazing fast for scraping fairly simple websites
  • Support CSS & XPath selectors

5. Apify SDK

Language: JavaScript

Apify SDK is one of the best web scrapers built in JavaScript. The scalable scraping library enables the development of data extraction and web automation jobs with headless Chrome and Puppeteer. With its unique powerful tools like RequestQueue and AutoscaledPool, you can start with several URLs and recursively follow links to other pages and can run the scraping tasks at the maximum capacity of the system respectively.

Advantages:

  • Scrape with largescale and high performance
  • Apify Cloud with a pool of proxies to avoid detection
  • Built-in support of Node.jsplugins like Cheerio and Puppeteer

6. Apache Nutch

Language: JAVA

Apache Nutch, another open-source scraper coded entirely in Java, has a highly modular architecture, allowing developers to create plug-ins for media-type parsing, data retrieval, querying and clustering. Being pluggable and modular, Nutch also provides extensible interfaces for custom implementations.

Advantages:

  • Highly extensible and scalable
  • Obey txt rules
  • Vibrant community and active development
  • Pluggable parsing, protocols, storage, and indexing

7. Jaunt

Language: JAVA

Jaunt, based on JAVA, is designed for web-scraping, web-automation and JSON querying. It offers a fast, ultra-light and headless browser which provides web-scraping functionality, access to the DOM, and control over each HTTP Request/Response, but does not support JavaScript.

Advantages:

  • Process individual HTTP Requests/Responses
  • Easy interfacing with REST APIs
  • Support for HTTP, HTTPS & basic auth
  • RegEx-enabled querying in DOM & JSON

8. Node-crawler

Language: JavaScript

Scrapy Web Scraping Software

Node-crawler is a powerful, popular and production web crawler based on Node.js. It is completely written in Node.js and natively supports non-blocking asynchronous I/O, which provides a great convenience for the crawler's pipeline operation mechanism. At the same time, it supports the rapid selection of DOM, (no need to write regular expressions), and improves the efficiency of crawler development.

Advantages:

  • Rate control
  • Different priorities for URL requests
  • Configurable pool size and retries
  • Server-side DOM & automatic jQuery insertion with Cheerio (default) or JSDOM

9. PySpider

Language: Python

PySpider is a powerful web crawler system in Python. It has an easy-to-use Web UI and a distributed architecture with components like scheduler, fetcher, and processor. It supports various databases, such as MongoDB and MySQL, for data storage.

Advantages:

  • Powerful WebUI with a script editor, task monitor, project manager, and result viewer
  • RabbitMQ, Beanstalk, Redis, and Kombu as the message queue
  • Distributed architecture

10. StormCrawler

Language: JAVA

StormCrawler is a full-fledged open-source web crawler. It consists of a collection of reusable resources and components, written mostly in Java. It is used for building low-latency, scalable and optimized web scraping solutions in Java and also is perfectly suited to serve streams of inputs where the URLs are sent over streams for crawling.

Advantages:

Scrapy Web Scraper

  • Highly scalable and can be used for large scale recursive crawls
  • Easy to extend with additional libraries
  • Great thread management which reduces the latency of crawl

Open source web scrapers are quite powerful and extensible but are limited to developers. There are lots of non-coding tools like Octoparse, making scraping no longer only a privilege for developers. If you are not proficient with programming, these tools will be more suitable and make scraping easy for you.

日本語記事：2020年オープンソースWebクローラー10選
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Artículo en español:10 Mejores Web Scraper de Código Abierto en 2020
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Author: Yina

It is a well-known fact that Python is one of the most popular programming languages for data mining and Web Scraping. There are tons of libraries and niche scrapers around the community, but we’d like to share the 5 most popular of them.

Most of these libraries' advantages can be received by using our API and some of these libraries can be used in stack with it.

The Top 5 Python Web Scraping Libraries in 2020#

1. Requests#

Well known library for most of the Python developers as a fundamental tool to get raw HTML data from web resources.

To install the library just execute the following PyPI command in your command prompt or Terminal:

After this you can check installation using REPL:

>>> r = requests.get('https://api.github.com/repos/psf/requests')
'A simple, yet elegant HTTP library.'
  • Official docs URL: https://requests.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
  • GitHub repository: https://github.com/psf/requests

2. LXML#

When we’re talking about the speed and parsing of the HTML we should keep in mind this great library called LXML. This is a real champion in HTML and XML parsing while Web Scraping, so the software based on LXML can be used for scraping of frequently-changing pages like gambling sites that provide odds for live events.

To install the library just execute the following PyPI command in your command prompt or Terminal:

The LXML Toolkit is a really powerful instrument and the whole functionality can’t be described in just a few words, so the following links might be very useful:

  • Official docs URL: https://lxml.de/index.html#documentation
  • GitHub repository: https://github.com/lxml/lxml/

Scrapy Web Scraping Software Reviews

3. BeautifulSoup#

Probably 80% of all the Python Web Scraping tutorials on the Internet uses the BeautifulSoup4 library as a simple tool for dealing with retrieved HTML in the most human-preferable way. Selectors, attributes, DOM-tree, and much more. The perfect choice for porting code to or from Javascript's Cheerio or jQuery.

Scrapy Web Scraping Software Free

To install this library just execute the following PyPI command in your command prompt or Terminal:

As it was mentioned before, there are a bunch of tutorials around the Internet about BeautifulSoup4 usage, so do not hesitate to Google it!

  • Official docs URL: https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/
  • Launchpad repository: https://code.launchpad.net/~leonardr/beautifulsoup/bs4

4. Selenium#

Selenium is the most popular Web Driver that has a lot of wrappers suitable for most programming languages. Quality Assurance engineers, automation specialists, developers, data scientists - all of them at least once used this perfect tool. For the Web Scraping it’s like a Swiss Army knife - there are no additional libraries needed because any action can be performed with a browser like a real user: page opening, button click, form filling, Captcha resolving, and much more.

To install this library just execute the following PyPI command in your command prompt or Terminal:

The code below describes how easy Web Crawling can be started with using Selenium:

from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
driver = webdriver.Firefox()
assert'Python'in driver.title
elem.send_keys('pycon')
assert'No results found.'notin driver.page_source

Scrapy Web Scraping Software Review

As this example only illustrates 1% of the Selenium power, we’d like to offer of following useful links:

  • Official docs URL: https://selenium-python.readthedocs.io/
  • GitHub repository: https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium

5. Scrapy#

Scrapy is the greatest Web Scraping framework, and it was developed by a team with a lot of enterprise scraping experience. The software created on top of this library can be a crawler, scraper, and data extractor or even all this together.

To install this library just execute the following PyPI command in your command prompt or Terminal:

We definitely suggest you start with a tutorial to know more about this piece of gold: https://docs.scrapy.org/en/latest/intro/tutorial.html

As usual, the useful links are below:

  • Official docs URL: https://docs.scrapy.org/en/latest/index.html
  • GitHub repository: https://github.com/scrapy/scrapy

Web Scraping

What web scraping library to use?#

Scrapy Web Scraping

So, it’s all up to you and up to the task you’re trying to resolve, but always remember to read the Privacy Policy and Terms of the site you’re scraping 😉.