colly VS lexbor

SerpApi focuses on scraping search results. That's why we need extra help to scrape individual sites. We'll use GoColly package.

Interesting. Can you compare it to colly? [0]

Last time I looked it was the most popular choice for scraping in Go and I have some projects using it.

Is it similar? Does it have more/less features or is it more suited for a different use case? (Which one?)

[0] https://github.com/gocolly/colly

Sounds cool, but how is this different from Colly: https://github.com/gocolly/colly?

We could write some snippets mixing all these, but the best option in real life is to use a tool with it all, like Scrapy, pyspider, node-crawler (Node.js), or Colly (Go).

Unless you're specifically trying to do it using net/http, I recommend using colly. I've used it in a few scrappers and I love it!

In this blog, we will be covering the basics of web scraping in Go using the Fiber and Colly frameworks. Colly is an open-source web scraping framework written in Go. It provides a simple and flexible API for performing web scraping tasks, making it a popular choice among Go developers. Colly uses Go's concurrency features to efficiently handle multiple requests and extract data from websites. It offers a wide range of customization options, including the ability to set request headers, handle cookies, follow redirects, and more

github.com/gocolly/colly - popular and widely-used library for web scraping in Go. It provides a higher-level API than net/http and makes it easier to extract information from websites. It also provides features such as concurrency, automatic request retries, and support for cookies and sessions.

Project is deprecated in favour of the same developer's lexbor project[0].

[0]: https://github.com/lexbor/lexbor

It supports both CSS selectors and XPath like Nokogiri, but with separate engines - parsing and CSS engine by Lexbor, XPath engine by libxml2. (Nokogiri internally converts CSS selectors to XPath syntax, and uses XPath engine for all searches).

An HTML parser, probably the simplest relatively modern example I could find is 1MB https://github.com/lexbor/lexbor (haven't used it, but might look more into it now that I know it exists.)

Lazyweb link: https://github.com/rushter/selectolax

although I don't follow the need to have what appears to be two completely separate HTML parsing C libraries as dependencies; seeing this in the readme for Modest gives me the shivers because lxml has _seen some shit_

> Modest is a fast HTML renderer implemented as a pure C99 library with no outside dependencies.

although its other dep seems much more cognizant about the HTML5 standard, for whatever that's worth: https://github.com/lexbor/lexbor#lexbor

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> It looks like the author of the article just googled some libraries for each language and didn't research the topic

Heh, oh, new to the Internet, are you? :-D

Lexbor is here: https://github.com/lexbor/lexbor

Well, regarding HTML5, what I've found was libxml (does not support tag-soup HTML5), https://github.com/lexbor/lexbor, for which I was unable to find good documentation ( see https://lexbor.com/docs/lexbor/#dom), Apache Xerces (appears to not support tag-soup HTML5 as well), and Gumbo, which does not appear to be active and to support selectors and XPath (although there are libraries that add that).

I think we've all (mostly?) tried it. It really is the Wild West of the web when you're trying to parse other people's HTML, though.

I've played around with this parser which is extremely quick. https://github.com/lexbor/lexbor

I’m glad to have the opportunity to contribute to an open-source project that is used by thousands of people. Hopefully, we will speed up Nokogiri (or XML parser it uses) to match the performance of html5ever or lexbor at some point in the future. 800 ms to extract data from HTML is still too much.