Web scraping with cheerio

Web scraping means extracting data from websites. This post covers extracting data from the page's HTML tags.

Prerequisites

• cheerio package is installed

• HTML page is retrieved via an HTTP client

Usage

• create a scraper object with load method by passing HTML content as an argument

  • set decodeEntities option to false to preserve encoded characters (like &) in their original form

  const $ = load('<div><!-- HTML content --></div>', { decodeEntities: false });

• find DOM elements by using CSS-like selectors

  const items = $('.item');

• iterate through found elements using each method

  items.each((index, element) => {
    // ...
  });

• access element content using specific methods

  • text - $(element).text()

  • HTML - $(element).html()

  • attributes

    • all - $(element).attr()
    • specific one - $(element).attr('href')

  • child elements

    • first - $(element).first()
    • last - $(element).last()
    • all - $(element).children()
    • specific one - $(element).find('a')

  • siblings

    • previous - $(element).prev()
    • next - $(element).next()

Disclaimer

Please check the website's terms of service before scraping it. Some websites may have terms of service that prohibit such activity.

Course

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