Waltir
By: Waltir

Cheerio Web Scraping

Cover Image for Cheerio Web Scraping

Introduction to Cheerio.js and Web Scraping

Web scraping is a powerful tool for data extraction from websites, allowing you to extract and collect valuable information without having to go through the manual process of visiting each site and copying the data. This is where Cheerio.js comes in. Cheerio.js is a lightweight, fast, and flexible library that can be used to parse and manipulate HTML and XML documents.

In this article, we will demonstrate how Cheerio.js can be used to scrape data from a government data source, specifically, a website containing information on government procurement contracts.

Getting Started with Cheerio.js

Before we dive into scraping data, let's start by installing Cheerio.js and its dependencies. To install Cheerio.js, you'll need to have Node.js installed on your machine. Once you have Node.js installed, run the following command in your terminal or command prompt:

npm install cheerio

Next, we'll create a new Node.js file and include the Cheerio.js library at the top of the file:

const cheerio = require('cheerio');

Scraping Data from a Government Data Source

To start scraping data from a government data source, we'll use the request library to send an HTTP request to the target website and retrieve the HTML content.

const request = require('request');

request('https://www.example.gov/contracts', (error, response, html) => {
  if (!error && response.statusCode == 200) {
    // success!
  }
});

Once we have the HTML content, we can use Cheerio.js to parse and manipulate the HTML.

const $ = cheerio.load(html);

Next, we'll use CSS selectors to extract the data we want to scrape. For example, if the data we want to scrape is contained within a table on the page, we might use the following selector to select all rows in the table:

const rows = $('table tr');

We can then loop through each row and extract the data we want, such as the contract number, vendor name, and contract value:

rows.each((index, row) => {
  const contractNumber = $(row).find('td:nth-child(1)').text();
  const vendorName = $(row).find('td:nth-child(2)').text();
  const contractValue = $(row).find('td:nth-child(3)').text();
  console.log(contractNumber, vendorName, contractValue);
});

In this article, we demonstrated how Cheerio.js can be used to scrape data from a government data source. Cheerio.js is a powerful library that makes it easy to parse and manipulate HTML and XML documents, and it's perfect for extracting data from websites. With Cheerio.js, you can save time and effort by automating the process of collecting data from websites, allowing you to focus on analyzing and making use of the data you collect.

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