Scrapy – An open-source scraping framework used to extract data from websites in any format which is built with efficiency and flexibility in mind. While Playwright and Selenium each have their own pros and cons, you can judge for yourself what is the best tool for your job via this comparison article.
Use it if you are working on large scraping or testing projects that need scale, are building tooling in multiple languages, and don’t mind spending a more time on configuration. Selenium – An older and popular language-agnostic tool for web scraping that inspired many of the newer frameworks. Use it if you are scraping or testing complex applications, are building tooling in multiple languages, or need to perform end-to-end testing. Playwright – One of the best language-agnostic and feature-rich tools for web scraping. What are the main programming frameworks for web scraping? Language Agnostic Tools In theory, one can automate almost anything done manually on the web – with a wide range in difficulty level of course. With just a little bit of coding knowledge, one can do some really interesting things to retrieve, organize, and even interact with various sites online. There are even plausible examples of these web crawlers filling out website profiles for some people, submitting posts, and solving captchas – but this is yet another debated gray area where one must be careful to not get in legal trouble. Some examples of working business models that use web scraping are tracker services that can alert you when something you desire is back in stock, review sites that aim to aggregate people’s opinions, travel websites that want to provide trip data in real-time, and even the much-contested media/marketing practice for gathering users’ profiles and preferences. For some specific use-cases, like the car dealership example above, this can save a lot of time, and frankly, there are a lot of business models built by this advent of web scrapers. One can write such an automated script fairly easily, with less than 10 lines of code, and automatically retrieve information from the web, obviating the need to search, organize, or interact with the website manually. This process is also known as a web crawler or bot. The act of retrieving information from, or interacting with a site hosted on the web using an automated programming script or process. This is where web scraping comes in, and is defined as such:
To do this manually, again would take a very long time.
Perhaps a project to view car prices for your favorite electric car on many car dealership websites. Now imagine another scenario where you need to take different parts of the web, and organize them for a specific purpose. Even if you somehow knew the address of each page, and assuming that you are only looking at a page for about 3 seconds, it would take you nearly 500 years to view everything. With the web now hosting almost 5 billion web pages, it would be impossible to view each one of these pages personally.
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