[Tutor] Scrapy vs. Beautiful Soup

[Alan Gauld]

"Crusier" <crusier at gmail.com> wrote

> I have also found that there is something called Scrapy. Please 
> kindly
> comment on it. Which one is easier to use compared with Beautiful
> Soup?

Well I can safely say that Beautiful Soup will be exactly the same
as Beauitiful Soup to use! :-)

As for scrapy I'd never heard of it, but a quick look at the tutorial
suggests its a different kind of bbeast entirely. For a start you
don't run it from Python you run it under scrapy - which is no doubt 
some
kind of wrap around python, but exactly how you would integrate scrapy
code within a bigger python project is not immediately clear.
Whereas BS is just another module you can import as usual.

Now it is possible that if all you want to do is scrape data from a 
web
site then scrapy may be all you need and it may be easier than BS
- it certainly didn't look too hard provided you are compfortable
defining XPath statements - but thats not exactly a common skill!
If you altready know XPath then scrapy would definitely be worth a 
try,
if not I'd stick with BS.

Just my opinion based on a very quick glance at the scrapy site.

HTH,

-- 
Alan Gauld
Author of the Learn to Program web site
http://www.alan-g.me.uk/