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Web Scraping

MacScrape's web scraping functionality is powered by our custom Forager module, which efficiently extracts data from websites.

Key Features

  • Intelligent Crawling: Automatically follows relevant links
  • Content Extraction: Pulls out main content, ignoring boilerplate
  • Metadata Parsing: Extracts titles, descriptions, and other metadata
  • JavaScript Rendering: Supports scraping of dynamic content
  • Rate Limiting: Respects website's crawl rates to avoid overloading

Scraping Process

graph TD
    A[URL Input] --> B[Fetch Page]
    B --> C{Is JavaScript?}
    C -->|Yes| D[Render with Headless Browser]
    C -->|No| E[Parse HTML]
    D --> E
    E --> F[Extract Content]
    F --> G[Follow Links]
    G --> B
    F --> H[Store Data]

Configuration Options

Option Description Default
max_depth Maximum depth to crawl 3
follow_external Follow external links false
respect_robots_txt Obey robots.txt rules true
javascript_support Enable JavaScript rendering false

Usage Example

from mac_scrape import Forager

forager = Forager(max_depth=2, javascript_support=True)
results = forager.crawl("https://example.com")

for page in results:
    print(f"Title: {page.title}")
    print(f"Content: {page.main_content[:100]}...")  # First 100 chars

Performance Metrics

Here's a comparison of MacScrape's Forager against other popular web scraping tools:

graph TD
    A[Web Scraping Tools]
    A --> B[MacScrape Forager]
    A --> C[BeautifulSoup]
    A --> D[Scrapy]

    B --> E[Speed: 8/10]
    B --> F[Ease of Use: 9/10]
    B --> G[Features: 9/10]

    C --> H[Speed: 6/10]
    C --> I[Ease of Use: 10/10]
    C --> J[Features: 7/10]

    D --> K[Speed: 10/10]
    D --> L[Ease of Use: 7/10]
    D --> M[Features: 10/10]

Best Practices

  1. Always respect the website's robots.txt file
  2. Implement proper error handling for network issues
  3. Use caching to avoid unnecessary repeated requests
  4. Regularly update your user agent string

Next Steps

Explore how MacScrape uses AI to analyze the scraped data in the AI Analysis section.