> I'm not sure why Python web scraping is so popular compared to Node.js web scraping
Take this with a grain of salt, since I am fully cognizant that I'm the outlier in most of these conversations, but Scrapy is A++ the no-kidding best framework for this activity that has been created thus far. So, if there was scrapyjs maybe I'd look into it, but there's not (that I'm aware of) so here we are. This conversation often comes up in any such "well, I just use requests & ..." conversation and if one is happy with main.py and a bunch of requests invocations, I'm glad for you, but I don't want to try and cobble together all the side-band stuff that Scrapy and its ecosystem provide for me in a reusable and predictable way
Also, often those conversations conflate the server side language with the "scrape using headed browser" language which happens to be the same one. So, if one is using cheerio <https://github.com/cheeriojs/cheerio> then sure node can be a fine thing - if the blog post is all "fire up puppeteer, what can go wrong?!" then there is the road to ruin of doing battle with all kinds of detection problems since it's kind of a browser but kind of not
I, under no circumstances, want the target site running their JS during my crawl runs. I fully accept responsibility for reproducing any XHR or auth or whatever to find the 3 URLs that I care about, without downloading every thumbnail and marketing JS and beacon and and and. I'm also cognizant that my traffic will thus stand out since it uniquely does not make the beacon and marketing calls, but my experience has been that I get the ban hammer less often with my target fetches than trying to pretend to be a browser with a human on the keyboard/mouse but is not
Take this with a grain of salt, since I am fully cognizant that I'm the outlier in most of these conversations, but Scrapy is A++ the no-kidding best framework for this activity that has been created thus far. So, if there was scrapyjs maybe I'd look into it, but there's not (that I'm aware of) so here we are. This conversation often comes up in any such "well, I just use requests & ..." conversation and if one is happy with main.py and a bunch of requests invocations, I'm glad for you, but I don't want to try and cobble together all the side-band stuff that Scrapy and its ecosystem provide for me in a reusable and predictable way
Also, often those conversations conflate the server side language with the "scrape using headed browser" language which happens to be the same one. So, if one is using cheerio <https://github.com/cheeriojs/cheerio> then sure node can be a fine thing - if the blog post is all "fire up puppeteer, what can go wrong?!" then there is the road to ruin of doing battle with all kinds of detection problems since it's kind of a browser but kind of not
I, under no circumstances, want the target site running their JS during my crawl runs. I fully accept responsibility for reproducing any XHR or auth or whatever to find the 3 URLs that I care about, without downloading every thumbnail and marketing JS and beacon and and and. I'm also cognizant that my traffic will thus stand out since it uniquely does not make the beacon and marketing calls, but my experience has been that I get the ban hammer less often with my target fetches than trying to pretend to be a browser with a human on the keyboard/mouse but is not