Web Scraping With JavaScript and Node.js Guide
Blog post from Bright Data
The article explores the limitations and advantages of using JavaScript for web scraping, emphasizing that frontend JavaScript is restricted due to browser security policies, while Node.js offers a more robust solution by running JavaScript on servers. It outlines prerequisites for setting up a Node.js environment and highlights various libraries like Axios and Cheerio that facilitate efficient web scraping by enabling HTTP requests and HTML parsing. The article provides a detailed tutorial on building a web scraper with Node.js to extract data from the Bright Data homepage, using Cheerio for DOM manipulation and Axios for fetching web pages. It also discusses transforming scraped data into JSON format and addresses potential challenges like anti-scraping measures. The tutorial underscores that while web scraping with Node.js is efficient, it can be complex due to evolving anti-bot technologies, suggesting advanced tools like Bright Data for more sophisticated scraping needs.