To make this example easy to follow, we’ll build a scraper using Puppeteer and Cheerio that’ll navigate to and bring back all quotes and authors from page 1. Building a Scraper with Cheerio and Puppeteer After all, Cheerio can make it easier to parse and select elements, while Puppeteer would give you access to content behind scripts and help you automate events like scrolling down for infinite paginations. That said, there are multiple cases where using both libraries is actually the best solution. Cheerio will help you scrape more pages faster and in fewer lines of code. ![]() The reasoning behind our recommendation is that Puppeteer is just overkill for static websites. If you want to scrape static pages that don’t require any interactions like clicks, JS rendering, or submitting forms, Cheerio is the best option, but If the website uses any form of Javascript to inject new content, you’ll need to use Puppeteer. Should You Use Cheerio or Puppeteer for Web Scraping?Īlthough you might already have an idea of the best scenarios, let us take all doubts out of the way. In web scraping, Puppeteer gives our script all the power of a browser engine, allowing us to scrape pages that require Javascript execution (like SPAs), scrape infinite scrolling, dynamic content, and more. It “ provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol.” On the other hand, Puppeteer is actually a browser automation tool, designed to mimic users’ behavior to test websites and web applications. Although in small projects we won’t notice, in large scraping tasks it will become a big time saver. Because Cheerio doesn’t render the website like a browser (it doesn’t apply CSS or load external resources), Cheerio is lightweight and fast. However, Cheerio is well known for its speed. To select elements, we can use CSS and XPath selectors, making navigating the DOM easier. What is Cheerio?Ĭheerio is a Node.js framework that parses raw HTML and XML data and provides a consistent DOM model to help us traverse and manipulate the result data structure. Now that you have a big picture vision, let’s dive deeper into what each library has to offer and how you can use them to extract alternative data from the web.
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