parsel VS got-scraping

An alternative for beautifulsoup is https://github.com/scrapy/parsel also from the scrapy team.

variable.css(".X5PpBb::text").get() # returns a text value variable.css(".gs_a").xpath("normalize-space()").get() # https://github.com/scrapy/parsel/issues/192#issuecomment-1042301716 variable.css(".gSGphe img::attr(srcset)").get() # returns a attribute value variable.css(".I9Jtec::text").getall() # returns a list of strings values variable.xpath('th/text()').get() # returns text value using xpath

Something I don't see discussed when this topic is brought up is that Scrapy's HTML parsing library, parsel, can be installed separately from scrapy itself. You can use it in place of beautifulsoup and, imo, it's much easier to use.

You could do the scraping yourself by hosting your own ServiceNow MID Server, making a bespoke scraping script on top of an existing library (example: got-scraping), then calling the scraper script via IntegrationHub & a Script Step)

While I agree that Scrapy is a great tool for beginner tutorials and easy entry into scraping, it's becoming difficult to use it in real world scenarios because almost all the large players now employ some anti-bot or anti-scraping protection.

A great example above all is Cloudflare. You simply can't convince Cloudflare you're a human with Scrapy alone. Scrapy has only experimental support of HTTP2 and does not support proxies over HTTP2 (https://github.com/scrapy/scrapy/issues/5213). Yet, all browsers use HTTP2 now, which means all normal users use HTTP2... You get the point.

What we use now is Got Scraping (https://github.com/apify/got-scraping). It's a special purpose extension of Got (HTTP client with 18 mil weekly downloads) that masks its HTTP communication as if it was coming from a real browser. Of course, this will not get you as far as Puppeteer or Playwright (headless browsers), but it improved our scraping tremendously. If you need a full crawling library, see the Apify SDK (https://sdk.apify.com) which uses Got Scraping under the hood.