requests-html VS Scrapy

requests-html

Ya, thanks for advice. When using requests_html library, I am trying to lower down the speed using response.html.render(timeout=1000), but it raise Runtime error instead on Google Colab: https://github.com/psf/requests-html/issues/517.

For dynamic js, prefer requests-html with xpath selection.

Example: requests-html which has a rather exhaustive README.md, but their dedicated page is not that helpful, if I remember correctly, and currently the domain is suspended.

When it comes to web scraping, the usual people recommend is beautifulsoup, lxml, or selenium. But I highly recommend people check out requests-html also. Its a library that is a happy medium between ease of use as in beautifulsoup and also good enough to be used for dynamic, javascript data where it would be overkill to use a browser emulator like selenium.

Quite possible. If you look at requests-html source code, it is simply one single python file that acts as a wrapper around a bunch of other packages, like requests, chromium, parse, lxml, etc., plus a couple convenience functions. So it could easily be some sort of bad dependency resolution.

What I do is try to see if I can use requests_html first before trying selenium. requests_html is usually enough if I dont need to interact with browser widgets or if the authentication isnt too difficult to reverse engineer.

Scrapy is a robust and scalable open-source web crawling framework. It is highly efficient for large-scale projects and supports asynchronous scraping.

Language: Python | GitHub: 52.9k stars | link

One might ask, what about Scrapy? I'll be honest: I don't really keep up with their updates. But I haven't heard about Zyte doing anything to bypass TLS fingerprinting. So out of the box Scrapy will also be blocked, but nothing is stopping you from using curl_cffi in your Scrapy Spider.

Install scrapy (Offical website) either using pip or conda (Follow for detailed instructions):

Using Scrapy I fetched the data needed (activities and attendance). Scrapy handled authentication using a form request in a very simple way:

Scrapy is an open-source Python-based web scraping framework that extracts data from websites. With Scrapy, you create spiders, which are autonomous scripts to download and process web content. The limitation of Scrapy is that it does not work very well with JavaScript rendered websites, as it was designed for static HTML pages. We will do a comparison later in the article about this.