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

How does it work

Register padawans to the jedi crawler, that have a pattern to match URL, and jQuery-style selectors. You can also post-process the data.

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

You can then give your padawans to the Jedi by doing

var jedi = require('./modules/jedi');
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);
});

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