this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
42 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43287 readers
759 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's not very slow to scrape a website. Works quite well. Your app would appear like any other browser to the site. The trouble with that is that it breaks easily when they change something on their site. Doesn't even have to be a malicious change.
That's good to know, I'll look into that some more. I was thinking that it might be slow if I'm having to scrape each page, every time a user changes categories (or something similar).
I completely forgot about that :(
You should look into how the webpage is built. If it's a static HTML webpage pre-rendered on the server, then you would have to scrape the HTML to extract the info.
However, many more "modern" webpages use client-side JavaScript to separately request the actual data from the web server through a REST/HTTP API. This kind of API is not possible to fully restrict, unless they want to require all users to log in for viewing the webpage.
And yeah, if it's built like that, then you'd want to make use of that REST API. You do not need to use JavaScript to call it. Using any HTTP client library in any programming language, or even just
curl, should work just as much.To see, if it's built like that, open the "Network" tab in the Developer Tools of your browser and refresh the webpage.
If it just loads a bunch of HTML, CSS and image files, then it's the static webpage kind. If it sends/receives messages with JSON in the body to URLs without a file-type, then it's likely the REST-API-kind.
Iβve got a feeling itβs a static site but Iβll confirm to make sure.
Well, it's as slow as the website you're scraping. Could actually be faster if you don't have to execute a lot of bullshit JavaScript. And for the rest clever caching should help.
In terms of technology you're looking for XSLT, Xpath, CSS selectors and whatever parsers are available for your language of choice. Don't ever attempt to use regex for scraping.
Proceeds to implement a scraper in bash with grep and awk because it's the only way i know how to
Why not at least use Python?
I've always been searching for the time to learn python, but between uni and work i wake up at 5 and go back home at 10; + they where not going to pay me for this fix
Tldr; couldn't be fucked to study a whole other language in my nonexistent free time for a fix that they wouldn't pay me for anyways
seconded
You've given me a great jumping off point, thank you!