Difference between BeautifulSoup and Scrapy crawler?

Question

I want to make a website that shows the comparison between amazon and e-bay product price. Which of these will work better and why? I am somewhat familiar with Beaut

Answer 1

Scrapy It is a web scraping framework which comes with tons of goodies which make scraping from easier so that we can focus on crawling logic only. Some of my favourite things scrapy takes care for us are below.

• Feed exports: It basically allows us to save data in various formats like CSV,JSON,jsonlines and XML.
• Asynchronous scraping: Scrapy uses twisted framework which gives us power to visit multiple urls at once where each request is processed in non blocking way(Basically we don't have to wait for a request to finish before sending another request).
• Selectors: This is where we can compare scrapy with beautiful soup. Selectors are what allow us to select particular data from the webpage like heading, certain div with a class name etc.). Scrapy uses lxml for parsing which is extremely fast than beautiful soup.

• Setting proxy,user agent ,headers etc: scrapy allows us to set and rotate proxy,and other headers dynamically.

• Item Pipelines: Pipelines enable us to process data after extraction. For example we can configure pipeline to push data to your mysql server.

• Cookies: scrapy automatically handles cookies for us.

etc.

TLDR: scrapy is a framework that provides everything that one might need to build large scale crawls. It provides various features that hide complexity of crawling the webs. one can simply start writing web crawlers without worrying about the setup burden.

Beautiful soup Beautiful Soup is a Python package for parsing HTML and XML documents. So with Beautiful soup you can parse a webpage that has been already downloaded. BS4 is very popular and old. Unlike scrapy,You cannot use beautiful soup only to make crawlers. You will need other libraries like requests,urllib etc to make crawlers with bs4. Again, this means you would need to manage the list of urls being crawled,to be crawled, handle cookies , manage proxy, handle errors, create your own functions to push data to CSV,JSON,XML etc. If you want to speed up than you will have to use other libraries like multiprocessing.

To sum up.

• Scrapy is a rich framework that you can use to start writing crawlers without any hassale.

• Beautiful soup is a library that you can use to parse a webpage. It cannot be used alone to scrape web.

You should definitely use scrapy for your amazon and e-bay product price comparison website. You could build a database of urls and run the crawler every day(cron jobs,Celery for scheduling crawls) and update the price on your database.This way your website will always pull from the database and crawler and database will act as individual components.