Semalt: Python Crawlers And Web Scraper Tools

In the modern world, the world of science and technology, all the data we need should be clearly presented, well-documented and available for instant download. So we could use this data for whatever purpose and anytime we need. However, in the majority of cases, the information needed is trapped inside of a blog or site. While some sites make efforts to present data in the structured, organized and clean format, the other fail to do that.

Crawling, processing, scraping, and cleaning of data are necessary for an online business. You have to collect information from multiple sources and save it in the proprietary databases to meet your business goals. Sooner or later, you will have to refer to the Python community to get access to various programs, frameworks, and software for grabbing your data off. Here are some famous and outstanding Python programs for scraping and crawling the sites and parsing out the data you require for your business.

Pyspider

Pyspider is one of the best Python web scrapers and crawlers on the internet. It is known for its web-based, user-friendly interface that makes it easy for us to keep track of the multiple crawls. Moreover, this program comes with multiple backend databases.

With Pyspider you can easily retry failed web pages, crawl websites or blogs by age and perform a variety of other tasks. It just needs two or three clicks to get your work done and crawl your data easily. You can use this tool in the distributed formats with multiple crawlers working at once. It is licensed by the Apache 2 license and is developed by GitHub.

MechanicalSoup

MechanicalSoup is a famous crawling library that is built around the famous and versatile HTML parsing library, called Beautiful Soup. If you feel that your web-crawling should be fairly simple and unique, you should try this program as soon as possible. It will make the crawling process easier. However, it may require you to click on a few boxes or enter some text.

Scrapy

Scrapy is a powerful web scraping framework that is supported by the active community of web developers and helps users build a successful online business. Moreover, it can export all types of data, collect and save them in multiple formats like CSV and JSON. It also has a few built-in or default extensions to perform tasks like cookie handling, user agent spoofs, and restricted crawlers.

Other Tools

If you are not comfortable with the programs described above, you may try Cola, Demiurge, Feedparser, Lassie, RoboBrowser, and other similar tools. It would not be wrong to say that the list is far beyond completion and there are plenty of options for those who don't like PHP and HTML codes.