If you are familiar with Curl, the command line tool for transferring data with URL syntax, you might wonder how can that be done with NodeJS. Well, looking at the nodeJS API, it's clear that HTTP.request gives you something that looks like a Curl equivalent. But, I want to write the response to a file and do some looping so that I can use an array of URLs instead of just making a request to one URL.
Looking around, I found a great nodeJS module called request which is a small abstraction on top of http.request and makes writing my script much easier. First, I added the request and filesystem module to my script plus the array of URLs I want to scrape. Then I did a for-loop to iterate through the array and inside the loop, I put the request function, passing the file and url parameters, and some console.log() calls to print what's happening:
If you want to programatically generate nodejs code from curl then try httpsnippet by Kong. Httpsnippet support lots of languages and is being actively maintained by Kong. HTTP Request snippet generator for many languages & tools including: cURL, HTTPie, Javascript, Node, C, Java, PHP, Objective-C, Swift, Python, Ruby, C#, Go, OCaml and more! Node.js® is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine. Installing Node.js via package manager. Note: The packages on this page are maintained and supported by their respective packagers, not the Node.js core team. Curl is a a command line tool that allows to transfer data across the network. It supports lots of protocols out of the box, including HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, SFTP, IMAP, SMTP, POP3, and many more. When it comes to debugging network requests, curl is one of the best tools you can find.
As you can see from the output, only the second url and file was scraped. In sorcerys shadow. This is because, in NodeJS, everything is asynchronous, so we need to pass the url and file from the loop to a separate function:
Nodejs Curl Install
If you want to programatically generate nodejs code from curl then try httpsnippet by Kong. Httpsnippet support lots of languages and is being actively maintained by Kong. HTTP Request snippet generator for many languages & tools including: cURL, HTTPie, Javascript, Node, C, Java, PHP, Objective-C, Swift, Python, Ruby, C#, Go, OCaml and more! Node.js® is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine. Installing Node.js via package manager. Note: The packages on this page are maintained and supported by their respective packagers, not the Node.js core team. Curl is a a command line tool that allows to transfer data across the network. It supports lots of protocols out of the box, including HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, SFTP, IMAP, SMTP, POP3, and many more. When it comes to debugging network requests, curl is one of the best tools you can find.
As you can see from the output, only the second url and file was scraped. In sorcerys shadow. This is because, in NodeJS, everything is asynchronous, so we need to pass the url and file from the loop to a separate function:
Nodejs Curl Install
Nodejs Curl Post Example
Another good nodeJS module for doing curl like web scraping is curlrequest. Fatima in lucias own words. Of course, for some serious web scraping, I recommend using PhantomJS.
