soup

Web Scraper in Go, similar to BeautifulSoup

soup is a small web scraper package for Go, with its interface highly similar to that of BeautifulSoup.

Exported variables and functions implemented till now :

var Headers map[string]string // Set headers as a map of key-value pairs, an alternative to calling Header() individually
var Cookies map[string]string // Set cookies as a map of key-value  pairs, an alternative to calling Cookie() individually
func Get(string) (string,error) {} // Takes the url as an argument, returns HTML string
func GetWithClient(string, *http.Client) {} // Takes the url and a custom HTTP client as arguments, returns HTML string
func Post(string, string, interface{}) (string, error) {} // Takes the url, bodyType, and payload as an argument, returns HTML string
func PostForm(string, url.Values) {} // Takes the url and body. bodyType is set to "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
func Header(string, string) {} // Takes key,value pair to set as headers for the HTTP request made in Get()
func Cookie(string, string) {} // Takes key, value pair to set as cookies to be sent with the HTTP request in Get()
func HTMLParse(string) Root {} // Takes the HTML string as an argument, returns a pointer to the DOM constructed
func Find([]string) Root {} // Element tag,(attribute key-value pair) as argument, pointer to first occurence returned
func FindAll([]string) []Root {} // Same as Find(), but pointers to all occurrences returned
func FindStrict([]string) Root {} //  Element tag,(attribute key-value pair) as argument, pointer to first occurence returned with exact matching values
func FindAllStrict([]string) []Root {} // Same as FindStrict(), but pointers to all occurrences returned
func FindNextSibling() Root {} // Pointer to the next sibling of the Element in the DOM returned
func FindNextElementSibling() Root {} // Pointer to the next element sibling of the Element in the DOM returned
func FindPrevSibling() Root {} // Pointer to the previous sibling of the Element in the DOM returned
func FindPrevElementSibling() Root {} // Pointer to the previous element sibling of the Element in the DOM returned
func Children() []Root {} // Find all direct children of this DOM element
func Attrs() map[string]string {} // Map returned with all the attributes of the Element as lookup to their respective values
func Text() string {} // Full text inside a non-nested tag returned, first half returned in a nested one
func FullText() string {} // Full text inside a nested/non-nested tag returned
func SetDebug(bool) {} // Sets the debug mode to true or false; false by default
func HTML() {} // HTML returns the HTML code for the specific element

Root is a struct, containing three fields :

• Pointer containing the pointer to the current html node
• NodeValue containing the current html node's value, i.e. the tag name for an ElementNode, or the text in case of a TextNode
• Error containing an error in a struct if one occurrs, else nil is returned. A detailed text explaination of the error can be accessed using the Error() function. A field Type in this struct of type ErrorType will denote the kind of error that took place, which will consist of either of the following
  • ErrUnableToParse
  • ErrElementNotFound
  • ErrNoNextSibling
  • ErrNoPreviousSibling
  • ErrNoNextElementSibling
  • ErrNoPreviousElementSibling
  • ErrCreatingGetRequest
  • ErrInGetRequest
  • ErrReadingResponse

Installation

Install the package using the command

go get github.com/anaskhan96/soup

Example

An example code is given below to scrape the "Comics I Enjoy" part (text and its links) from xkcd.

More Examples

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"github.com/anaskhan96/soup"
	"os"
)

func main() {
	resp, err := soup.Get("https://xkcd.com")
	if err != nil {
		os.Exit(1)
	}
	doc := soup.HTMLParse(resp)
	links := doc.Find("div", "id", "comicLinks").FindAll("a")
	for _, link := range links {
		fmt.Println(link.Text(), "| Link :", link.Attrs()["href"])
	}
}

Contributions

This package was developed in my free time. However, contributions from everybody in the community are welcome, to make it a better web scraper. If you think there should be a particular feature or function included in the package, feel free to open up a new issue or pull request.