Benefits of using scrapy over requests/selenium

When I'm writing webscrapers I mostly just pivot between selenium (because the website is too "fancy" and definitely needs a browser) and pure requests calls (both in conjunction with bs4).

But when reading about scrapers, scrapy is often the first mentioned Python package. What am I missing out on if I'm not using it?

12 points · 3 comments · view on lemmy.world

3 Comments

Wats0ns@programming.dev · 2 pts · 3y (2 replies)

The huge feature of scrapy is it's pipelining system: you scrape a page, pass it to the filtering part, then to the deduplication part, then to the DB and so on

Hugely useful when you're scraping and extraction data, I reckon if you're only extracting raw pages then it's less useful I guess

qwertyasdef@programming.dev · 1 pts · 3y (1 reply)

Oh shit that sounds useful. I just did a project where I implemented a custom stream class to chain together calls to requests and beautifulsoup.

Wats0ns@programming.dev · 2 pts · 3y

Yep try scrapy. And also it handles for you the concurrency of your pipelines items, configuration for every part,...