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There have been significant advances in the web scraping domain in the past few years.
Web scraping is being used as a means for gathering & analyzing data across the web.
Lets take a look at some of the popular web scraping frameworks.
The following are self-hosted solution so you got to install and configure yourself.
You may check out this post forcloud-based scraping solution.
Scrapy
Scrapyis a collaborative framework based on Python.
It provides a complete suite of libraries.
A fully-asynchronous that can accept requests and process them, faster.
MechanicalSoup
MechanicalSoupcan simulate human behavior on web pages.
It is based on a web parsing library BeautifulSoup which is most efficient in simple sites.
Jaunt
Jauntfacilities like automated scraping, JSON based data querying, and a headless ultra-light web client.
It supports tracking of every HTTP request/response being executed.
This is resolved by use of Jauntium that is discussed next.
Jauntium
Jauntiumis an enhanced version of the Jaunt framework.
It not only resolves the drawbacks in Jaunt but also adds more features.
Suitable to use when you gotta automate some processes and test them on different browsers.
Storm Crawler
Storm Crawleris a full-fledged Java-based web crawler framework.
It is utilized for building scalable and optimized web crawling solutions in Java.
Storm Crawler is primarily preferred to serve streams of inputs where the URLs are sent over streams for crawling.
Norconex
NorconexHTTP collector allows you to build enterprise-grade crawlers.
It is available as a compiled binary that can be run across many platforms.
Norconex can be integrated to work with Java as well as over the bash command line.
Apify
Apify SDKis a JS based crawling framework that is quite similar to Scrapy discussed above.
It is one of the best web crawling libraries built in Javascript.
It supports easy integration with Headless Chrome browsers, Phantom JS as well as simple HTTP requests.
Colly allows you to write any key in of crawlers, spiders as well as scrapers as needed.
It is primarily of great importance when the data to scraped is structured.
Colly can be a good fit for data analysis and mining applications requirement.
If you need a full-stack web scraping solution, check out ourScrapeless review.
Grablab
Grablabis highly scalable in nature.
Grablib has inbuilt support for handling the response from requests.
Thus, it allows scraping through web services too.
BeautifulSoup
BeautifulSoupis a Python-based web scraping library.
It is normally leveraged on top of other frameworks that require better searching and indexing algorithms.
For instance, Scrapy framework discussed above uses BeautifulSoup as one of its dependencies.
The benefits of BeautifulSoup include:
Check out thisonline courseif interested in learning BeautifulSoap.
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