Cross-browser: Playwright supports all modern browsers, including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge (with Chromium), Apple Safari (with WebKit), and Mozilla Firefox.It also comes with headless browser support. Its simplicity and powerful automation capabilities make it an ideal tool for web scraping. Feel free to submit any pull request as long as you added unit tests if relevant and passed them all.Playwright is a browser automation framework with APIs available in Javascript, Python. You’ll never find yourself crawling pages massively on a browser, but for most of your scraping tasks, client-side should enhance your productivity dramatically.Ĭontributions are more than welcome. The intention here is not at all to say that classical scraping is obsolete but rather that client-side scraping is a possibility today and, what’s more, a useful one. Moreover, it gives you the possibility to create bookmarklets on the fly to execute your personnal scripts. One could easily build an application with a UI on top of artoo.js. Tools for non-devs: You can easily design tools for non-dev people.You are already authenticated on your browser as a human being. No more authentication issues: No longer need to deploy clever solutions to enable your spiders to authenticate on the website you intent to scrape.Fast coding: You can prototype your code live thanks to JavaScript browsers’ REPL and peruse the DOM with tools specifically built for web development.Using browsers as scraping platforms comes with a lot of advantages: So why shouldn’t we take advantage of this and start scraping within the cosy environment of web browsers? It has become really easy today to execute JavaScript in aĪ browser’s console and this is exactly what artoo.js is doing. So, by the days, to cope with this harsh reality, our scraping programs became complex monsters being able to execute JavaScript, authenticate on websites and mimic human behaviour.īut, if you sit back and try to find other programs able to perform all those things, you’ll quickly come to this observation:Īren’t we trying to rebuild web browsers? We need cookies, we need authentication, we need JavaScript execution and a million other things to get proper data. The only problem with this process is that, nowadays, websites are not just plain html. Usually, the scraping process occurs thusly: we find sites from which we need to retrieve data and we consequently build a program whose goal is to fetch those site’s html and parse it to get what we need. Well, before quitting the present documentation and run back to your beloved spiders, you should pause for a minute or two and read the reasons why artoo.js has made the choice of client-side scraping. « Why on earth should I scrape on my browser? Isn’t this insane? » User Interfaces: build parasitic user interfaces easily with a creative usage of Shadow DOM.Custom bookmarklets: you can use artoo as a framework and easily create custom bookmarklets to execute your code.jQuery: jQuery is injected alongside artoo in the pages you visit so you can handle the DOM easily.Sniffers: hook on XHR requests to retrieve circulating data with a variety of tools.Store: stash persistent data in the localStorage with artoo’s handy abstraction.Content expansion: Expand pages’ content programmatically thanks to toExpand utilities.Spiders: Crawl pages through ajax and retrieve accumulated data with artoo’s spiders.Data download: Make your browser download the scraped data with artoo.save methods.Loaded with helpers: Scrape data quick & easy with powerful methods such as artoo.scrape. ![]() Scrape everything, everywhere: invoke artoo in the JavaScript context of any web page.* If you need a more thorough scraper, check this out. You’ve just scraped Hacker News front page and downloaded the data as a pretty-printed json file*. Open your JavaScript console and click the freshly created bookmarklet (the droid should greet you and tell you he is ready to roll).scrape ( ' td.title:nth-child(3) ', , artoo.
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