Re:Show HN: Till – Unblock and scale your web scrapers, with...
by PaulHoule on Wednesday August 04, 2021 @09:23AM
(#28060725)
Almost always the API is nerfed relative to the web site.
Almost all web sites that authenticate use "submit a form with username and password and respect cookies"; often sites that don't authenticate to use the web site require authentication for the API. Every API uses a different authentication scheme and requires custom programming: for web sites you have the URL of the form and the name of the username and password field and you are done.
If you feed most HTML pages through a DOM parser like BeautifulSoup you can extract the links and interpret them through regexes. You might be done right then and there. If you need more usually you can use CSS classes and id(s) and... done!
I wrote a metadata extractor for Wikimedia HTML that I had working provisionally on Flickr HTML immediately and had working at 100% in 20 minutes. No way I could have gotten the authentication working for an API in 20 minutes.
Almost all web sites that authenticate use "submit a form with username and password and respect cookies"; often sites that don't authenticate to use the web site require authentication for the API. Every API uses a different authentication scheme and requires custom programming: for web sites you have the URL of the form and the name of the username and password field and you are done.
If you feed most HTML pages through a DOM parser like BeautifulSoup you can extract the links and interpret them through regexes. You might be done right then and there. If you need more usually you can use CSS classes and id(s) and... done!
I wrote a metadata extractor for Wikimedia HTML that I had working provisionally on Flickr HTML immediately and had working at 100% in 20 minutes. No way I could have gotten the authentication working for an API in 20 minutes.