Company
Date Published
Author
Federico Trotta
Word count
2068
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Scrapy and Pyspider are two open-source Python frameworks designed for web scraping, with each offering distinct advantages and limitations. Scrapy is well-suited for large-scale, complex scraping projects due to its support for parallel crawling, advanced features like throttling, and seamless CLI integration with external pipelines. It supports both XPath and CSS selectors and benefits from a large, active community. Pyspider, although deprecated, offers ease of use with a user-friendly UI and supports distributed crawling and task scheduling. It automatically retries failed tasks but requires manual proxy rotation. Both frameworks face challenges with dynamic content sites and IP bans due to automated requests, which can be mitigated by integrating proxies. While Pyspider's development has ceased, Scrapy remains a strong choice for those comfortable with command-line interfaces and requiring updated Python support. Ultimately, the choice between Scrapy and Pyspider depends on the user's specific needs, project scale, and interface preferences.