JavaScript is the most famous web programming language and its famous js packages include NodeJs, AngularJs, ReactJs, and etc. Nodes is a widely use javaScript package and also as a compiler for JavaScript in command lines. We are going to use Node.js for doing the web scraping. Why web scraping is important and why we need that. Web scraping is basically used to scrap web page data. The website holds a lot of data daily, take an example of a bbc.com news site. That had news information update every minute and suppose we want to get the news in text form. Well doing manually scraping is not a solution, in that case, the web scraping tools come into action. Not only JavaScript can scrap webpage you can use any programming language and use an HTTP requests module to scrap.Getting started with web scraping can be broken down into two simple steps.
1:Requesting the web page source code using any Http requests module
2:Parsing the required data from the web page source code
This guide will walk you through the complete scraping process using the famous node.js library CheerioJs and request_process. Working through the example that is shown in this article will make you a pro in gathering data from websites. First thing first: If you don’t have NodeJs installed in your system, download the latest version from the official NodeJs site, after installing NodeJs successfully, install the required libraries using the following commands.Our target website is showing below in the image.
npm i cheerio
The first step in our coding is we need to fetch the HTML source code of the page, well by using the Axios module in node.js we can fetch the page and pass it to cheerio for parsing and extraction of the data. Check the following command to install the Axios with npm and Create a Js file, I’m making a js file with the name scrape.js.
#web-scraping #nodejs #javascript #web-development #developer