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How are private front-ends built without APIs?
(self.asklemmy)
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this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
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Asklemmy
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It's not very slow to scrape a website. Works quite well. Your app would appear like any other browser to the site. The trouble with that is that it breaks easily when they change something on their site. Doesn't even have to be a malicious change.
That's good to know, I'll look into that some more. I was thinking that it might be slow if I'm having to scrape each page, every time a user changes categories (or something similar).
I completely forgot about that :(
Well, it's as slow as the website you're scraping. Could actually be faster if you don't have to execute a lot of bullshit JavaScript. And for the rest clever caching should help.
In terms of technology you're looking for XSLT, Xpath, CSS selectors and whatever parsers are available for your language of choice. Don't ever attempt to use regex for scraping.
seconded
Proceeds to implement a scraper in bash with grep and awk because it's the only way i know how to
Why not at least use Python?
I've always been searching for the time to learn python, but between uni and work i wake up at 5 and go back home at 10; + they where not going to pay me for this fix
Tldr; couldn't be fucked to study a whole other language in my nonexistent free time for a fix that they wouldn't pay me for anyways
You've given me a great jumping off point, thank you!
You should look into how the webpage is built. If it's a static HTML webpage pre-rendered on the server, then you would have to scrape the HTML to extract the info.
However, many more "modern" webpages use client-side JavaScript to separately request the actual data from the web server through a REST/HTTP API. This kind of API is not possible to fully restrict, unless they want to require all users to log in for viewing the webpage.
And yeah, if it's built like that, then you'd want to make use of that REST API. You do not need to use JavaScript to call it. Using any HTTP client library in any programming language, or even just
curl, should work just as much.To see, if it's built like that, open the "Network" tab in the Developer Tools of your browser and refresh the webpage.
If it just loads a bunch of HTML, CSS and image files, then it's the static webpage kind. If it sends/receives messages with JSON in the body to URLs without a file-type, then it's likely the REST-API-kind.
I’ve got a feeling it’s a static site but I’ll confirm to make sure.