1. Screen Scraping Tools
2. Best Screen Scraper Software
3. Web Scraping Tools Open Source
4. Web Scraping Tools Open Source Java

In order to use the Web Scraper feature, you have to undertake the following steps: Install the Chrome Extension. Go to the developer tools by clicking F12 or Ctrl+Shift+I. Browse to the Web Scraper tab. Click on the button create new sitemap and add the sitemap name and start URL. Multiple URL can be added here by clicking the + button. Scrapy is a scraping framework supported by an active community with which you can build your own scraping tool. In addition to scraping and parsing tools, it can easily export the data it collects in a number of formats like JSON or CSV and store the data on a backend of your choosing.

• 10 Best Open Source Web Scraping Tools. We built Proxies API after working on web scraping and data mining projects for over 15 years. We realised how steep the learning curve was for any one starting new and also how many support tools you need even if you are very experienced. After spending hundreds of hours repeatedly.
• Heritrix is one of the most popular free and open-source web crawlers in Java. Actually, it is an extensible, web-scale, archival-quality web scraping project. Heritrix is a very scalable and fast solution. You can crawl/archive a set of websites in no time.

Cheerio JS

Cheerio is ideal for programmers with experience in JQuery. You can deploy Cheerio JS on the server-side to do web scraping easily using JQuery selectors.

Scraping can be as simple as

Website: https://cheerio.js.org/

Sponsor cheerio https://cheerio.js.org/

Beautiful Soup

One of the aftermaths of the Internet Explorer era is how badly formed most HTML on the web is. It's one of the common realities you are hit with when you start any web scraping project.

No library wrangles with bad HTML as well as beautiful Soup.

Beautiful Soup provides a few simple methods and Pythonic idioms for navigating, searching, and modifying a parse tree: a toolkit for dissecting a document and extracting what you need. It doesn't take much code to write an application. It also handles all encoding issues automatically.

Link https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/

Kimura Framework

A brilliantly simple Ruby-based framework that can render javascript and comes out of the box with headless chromium and Firefox

Here is how simple it is to work with infinite scroll web pages

Link https://github.com/vifreefly/kimuraframework

Import.io

Import IO is an enterprise-grade web scraping service that is quite popular.

They help you set up, maintain, monitor, crawl, and scrape data.

They also help you visualize data with the chart, graphs, and excellent reporting functions.

Link https://www.import.io/

Goutte

Goutte is a screen scraping and web crawling library for PHP.

Goutte provides a nice API to crawl websites and extract data from the HTML/XML responses.

PHP Version: PHP 7.1 .

Example of submitting a form in Goutte

Link github.com

Scrapy

Scrapy is an extremely powerful crawling and scraping library written in Python.

Here is how easy it is to create a multi-threaded crawler and parse it at a single endpoint.

And to scrape, it allows both XPath and CSS selectors.

Link here http://doc.scrapy.org/en/latest/

Mechanical Soup

Mechanical Soup is a super simple library that helps you scrape, store and pass cookies, submit forms, etc. but it doesn't support Javascript rendering.

Here is an example of submitting a form and scraping the results on Duck Duck Go

Link here https://github.com/MechanicalSoup/MechanicalSoup

PySpider

PySpider is useful if you want to crawl and spider at massive scales. It has a web UI to monitor crawling projects, support DB integrations out of the box, uses message queues, and comes ready with support for a distributed architecture. This library is a beast.

You can do complex operations like...

Set priorities.

Set delayed crawls. This one crawls after 30 mins using queues

this one automatically recrawls a page every 5 hours

Link http://docs.pyspider.org/en/latest/

NodeCrawler

This powerful crawling and scraping package for Node Js allows server-side DOM and injection of JQuery and has queueing support with controllable pool sizes, priority settings, and rate limit control.

It's great for working with bottlenecks like rate limits that many websites impose.

Here is an example that does that.

Link http://nodecrawler.org/#basic-usage

Selenium Web Driver

Selenium was built for automating tasks on web browsers but is very effective in web scraping as well.

Here you are controlling the Firefox browser and automating a search query.

Its language agnostic, so here is the same thing accomplished using Javascript.

Link https://selenium.dev/documentation/en/

Puppeteer

Puppeteer lives up to its name and comes closest to full-scale browser automation. It can do more or less everything that a human can do.

It can take screenshots, render javascript, submit forms, simulate keyboard input,

This example takes a screenshot of the Ycombinator home page in very few lines of code.

Link https://github.com/puppeteer/puppeteer

Colly

Colly is a super fast and scalable and extremely popular spider/scraper.

It supported web crawling, rate limiting, caching, parallel scraping, cookie, and session handling and distributed scraping.

Here is an example of fetching 2 URLs in parallel.

Link https://github.com/gocolly/colly

Javascript is a widely-used programming language and an ever-increasing number of websites use JavaScript to fetch and render user content. While there are various tools available for web scraping, a growing number of people are exploring Javascript web scraping tools.

To carry out your web scraping projects, you need to familiarize yourself with web scraping tools to choose the right one. We will walk through open source Javascript tools and frameworks that are great for web crawling, web scraping, parsing, and extracting data.

Open Source Javascript Web Scraping Tools and Frameworks

Note: All details in the table above are current at the time of writing this article.

Apify SDK

Apify SDK is a Node.js library which is a lot like Scrapy positioning itself as a universal web scraping library in JavaScript, with support for Puppeteer, Cheerio, and more. With its unique features like RequestQueue and AutoscaledPool, you can start with several URLs and then recursively follow links to other pages and can run the scraping tasks at the maximum capacity of the system respectively.

Requirements – The Apify SDK requires Node.js 10.17 or later
Available Selectors – CSS
Available Data Formats – JSON, JSONL, CSV, XML, Excel or HTML

Pros

• Supports any type of website
• Best library for web crawling in Javascript we have tried so far.
• Built-in support for Puppeteer and Cheerio

Installation
Add Apify SDK to any Node.js project by running:

Best Use Case

Apify SDK is a preferred tool when other solutions fall flat during heavier tasks – performing deep crawls, rotating proxies to mask the browser, scheduling the scraper to run multiple times, caching results to prevent data prevention if the code happens to crash, and more. Apify handles such operations with ease but it can also help to develop web scrapers of your own in Javascript.

Node SimpleCrawler

Simplecrawler is designed to provide a basic, flexible, and robust API for crawling websites. It was written to archive, analyze, and search some very large websites and can get through hundreds of thousands of pages and write large volumes of data without issue. It has a lot of useful events that can help you track the progress of your crawling process. This crawler is extremely configurable and there’s a long list of settings you can change to adapt it to your specific needs.

Requirements – Node.js 8.0+

Pros

• Respects robot.txt rules
• Highly configurable
• Easy setup and installation

Cons

• Does not download the response body when it encounters an HTTP error status in the response
• No promise support
• May get invalid URLs because of its brute force approach

Installation
To install simplecrawler type the command:

Best Use Case

If you need to start off with a flexible and configurable base for writing your own crawler

NodeCrawler

Nodecrawler is a popular web crawler for NodeJS, making it a very fast crawling solution. If you prefer coding in JavaScript, or you are dealing with mostly a Javascript project, Nodecrawler will be the most suitable web crawler to use. Its installation is pretty simple too. JSDOM and Cheerio (used for HTML parsing) use it for server-side rendering, with JSDOM being more robust.

Requires Version – Node v4.0.0 or greater
Available Selectors – CSS, XPath
Available Data Formats – CSV, JSON, XML

Pros

• Easy installation

Cons

• It has no Promise support

Installation
To install this package with npm:

Best Use Case

If you need a lightweight web crawler that combines efficiency and convenience.

PJScrape

PJscrape is a web scraping framework written in Python using Javascript and JQuery. It is built to run with PhantomJS, so it allows you to scrape pages in a fully rendered, Javascript-enabled context from the command line, with no browser required. The scraper functions are evaluated in a full browser context. This means you not only have access to the DOM, but you also have access to Javascript variables and functions, AJAX-loaded content, etc.

Requires Version – Node v4.0.0+, PhantomJS v.1.3+
Available Selectors – CSS
Available Data Format – JSON

Pros

• Easy installation and setup for more than one scraper
• Suitable for recursive crawling

Cons

• Poor documentation

Installation
To install this package with npm:

Best Use Case

If you need a web scraping tool in Javascript and JQuery

Puppeteer

Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a powerful but simple API that allows you to control Google’s headless Chrome browser. A headless browser means you have a browser that can send and receive requests but has no GUI. It works in the background, performing actions as instructed by an API. You can truly simulate the user experience, typing where they type and clicking where they click.

A headless browser is a great tool for automated testing and server environments where you don’t need a visible UI shell. For example, you may want to run some tests against a real web page, create a PDF of it, or just inspect how the browser renders a URL. Puppeteer can also be used to take screenshots of web pages visible by default when you open a web browser.

Puppeteer’s API is very similar to Selenium WebDriver, but works only with Google Chrome. Puppeteer has a more active support than Selenium, so if you are working with Chrome, Puppeteer is your best option for web scraping.

Requires Version – Node v6.4.0, Node v7.6.0 or greater
Available Selectors – CSS
Available Data Formats – JSON

Pros

• With its full-featured API, it covers a majority of use cases
• The best option for scraping Javascript websites on Chrome

Cons

• Only available for Chrome/Chromium browser
• Supports only JSON format

Installation
To install Puppeteer in your project run:

This will install Puppeteer and download the recent version of Chromium browser to run the puppeteer code. By default, puppeteer works with the Chromium browser but you can also use Chrome. You can also use the lightweight version of Puppeteer – puppeteer core. To install type the command:

Best Use Case

• If you need to test the speed, performance, responsivenes, and UI of a website.
• If you are using Chrome, Puppeteer is your best option for web scraping.
• If the information you want is generated using

Playwright

Playwright is a Node library to automate multiple browsers with a single API. It enables cross-browser web automation that is ever-green, capable, reliable, and fast. Playwright was created to improve automated UI testing by eliminating flakiness, improving the speed of execution, and offering insights into the browser operation.

Screen Scraping Tools

Playwright is very similar to Puppeteer in many respects. The API methods are identical in most cases, and Playwright also bundles compatible browsers by default. Playwright’s biggest differentiating point is cross-browser support. It can drive Chromium, WebKit, MS Edge, and Firefox.

A noteworthy difference is that Playwright has a more powerful browser context feature than Puppeteer. This lets you simulate multiple devices with a single browser instance.

Requires Version – Node.js 10.15 or above.
Available Selectors – CSS
Available Data Formats – JSON

Pros

• Cross Browser support
• Detailed documentation

Con

• They have only patched the WebKit and Firefox debugging protocols, not the actual rendering engine

Installation
To install the package:

This installs Playwright and browser binaries for Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit. Once installed, you can use Playwright in a Node.js script and automate web browser interactions.

Best use case

If you need an efficient tool as good as Puppeteer to perform UI testing but across multiple browsers, you should use Playwright.

Cheerio

Cheerio is a library that parses raw HTML and XML documents and allows you to use the syntax of jQuery while working with the downloaded data. With Cheerio, you can write filter functions to fine-tune which data you want from your selectors. If you are writing a web scraper in JavaScript, Cheerio API is a fast option that makes parsing, manipulating, and rendering efficient.

It does not – interpret the result as a web browser, produce a visual rendering, apply CSS, load external resources, or execute JavaScript. If you require any of these features, you should consider projects like PhantomJS or JSDom.

Requirements – Up to date versions of Node.js and npm
Available Selectors – CSS

Pros

• Parsing, rendering and manipulating documents is very efficient
• Flexible, Easy to Use
• Very fast (Preliminary end to end benchmarks suggests its 8x faster than JSDOM)

Cons

• Does not fare well for dynamic Javascript websites

Best Screen Scraper Software

Installation
To install the required modules using NPM, simply type the following command:

Best Use Case

If you need speed, go for Cheerio.

These are just some of the open-source javascript web scraping tools and frameworks you can use for your web scraping projects. If you have greater scraping requirements or would like to scrape on a much larger scale it’s better to use web scraping services.

If you aren’t proficient with programming or your needs are complex, or you need large volumes of data to be scraped, there are great web scraping services that will suit your requirements to make the job easier for you.

You can save time and get clean, structured data by trying us out instead – we are a full-service provider that doesn’t require the use of any tools and all you get is clean data without any hassles.

We can help with your data or automation needs

Web Scraping Tools Open Source

Turn the Internet into meaningful, structured and usable data

Web Scraping Tools Open Source Java