JEDI CRAWLER

Da fuq?

JEDI CRAWLER is a Node/PhantomJS crawler made to scrape pretty much anything from Node, with a really simple syntax. Work in progress ladies

npm install jedi-crawler

How does it work

Register padawans to the jedi crawler, that have a pattern to match a URL, and jQuery-style selectors. You can also post-process the data if you need to do some treatment (number conversion, etc)

wikipedia.js:

module.exports = function(jedi) {

  jedi.registerPadawan({
    // Pattern to match URL
    pattern: /en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\//,
    // Selectors to be executed
    selectors:{
      title:{
        sel: "#firstHeading span",
        type: "text"
      },
      firstParagraph:{
        sel: "#toc ~ p:first",
        type: "text"
      }
    },
    // You can choose to process the data AFTER being crawled.
    postProcessing: function(data) {
      /// Do your custom processing on the data processed
      data.title = data.title.toUpperCase();
      return data;
    }
  });

};

For now only two types of selectors are supported : "text" and "src"

I find having one file per padawan (crawler) pretty cool for code clarity and also padawans need to learn by themselve and be alone

npm install jedi-crawlers

You can then give your padawans to the Jedi by doing

var jedi = require('jedi-crawler');
require('./padawans/wikipedia')(jedi);

And then you can do

jedi.crawl('http://en.wikipedia.org/whatever', function(err, result){
  console.log(err);
  console.log(result);
});

As the jedi will figure out what padawan to use given on the URL and of the pattern you set

Special features

Crawlers only start to scrape the page as soon as $(document).ready is fired. Our own version of jQuery is injected into the page, but then we also give back the $ to its owner in case they're executing 3rd party libraries to modify the DOM or w/e

If your selectors matches severals DOM elements, then an array of every value is returned

Right now, PhantomJS is instantiated with "--load-images=no" option so the page loads faster

Test it now

Pull that bad boy Make sure you have PhantomJS installed Run node main.js