Company
Date Published
Author
Aniket Bhattacharyea
Word count
2283
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Node.js has become a favored choice for web scraping due to its dual client-side and server-side capabilities and its rich library ecosystem. This article highlights the use of the cheerio library, which offers a fast, flexible way to parse and manipulate HTML and XML, leveraging a syntax familiar to jQuery users. The tutorial guides readers through setting up a Node.js project, using the Axios package to fetch web pages, and employing cheerio to extract data from static web pages, such as book titles, prices, and availability from the "Books to Scrape" website. The tutorial further demonstrates how to save scraped data into a CSV file using the node-csv package. While cheerio excels at parsing static content, it lacks the ability to execute JavaScript, necessitating more advanced tools like Selenium or Playwright for dynamic content. The article provides a comprehensive walkthrough and encourages readers to explore Bright Data's web scraping solutions for more complex needs.