Puppeteer
Puppeteer is a Node.js library developed by Google, which provides a high-level API for controlling a headless (without a GUI) Chrome or Chromium browser. With Puppeteer, developers can automate tasks that would normally require manual interaction with a web browser, such as filling out and submitting forms, navigating through pages, taking screenshots, and generating PDFs.
Puppeteer offers a lot of flexibility and control over the headless browser, enabling developers to simulate real user interactions and test web applications in a variety of scenarios. It also provides a debugging interface for troubleshooting and fine-tuning automation scripts.
In addition to its automation capabilities, Puppeteer can be used for web scraping, data extraction, and performance testing. Its intuitive API and extensive documentation make it a popular choice among developers for a wide range of web development tasks.
Puppeteer is suitable for web scraping. In fact, it provides a powerful set of features for scraping data from websites, including:
- Emulating user interaction: With Puppeteer, you can simulate user interactions like scrolling, clicking, and typing, which is essential for scraping dynamic web pages that load data asynchronously.
- Accessing the DOM: Puppeteer provides methods to access the Document Object Model (DOM) of a web page, which allows you to extract data from specific elements on the page.
- Taking screenshots: Puppeteer can capture screenshots of web pages, which can be useful for debugging and for visual confirmation of the data being scraped.
- Generating PDFs: With Puppeteer, you can generate PDFs of web pages, which can be useful for archiving or sharing data.
- Handling authentication and session management: Puppeteer can log in to websites and maintain sessions, allowing you to scrape data from pages that require authentication.
Puppeteer supports proxy servers. You can also set other proxy-related options such as authentication credentials, bypassing the proxy for certain addresses, and more.
Puppeteer does not have built-in support for rotating proxies. However, you can use third-party libraries and services to rotate proxies while using Puppeteer for web scraping or other tasks.
Overall, rotating proxies can be useful for web scraping and other tasks where you need to avoid being detected or rate-limited by a website.
