beautifulstew

BeautifulStew documentation.

Author

Ajah, Chukwuemeka

Contacts

chukwuemekaajah on npmJS chukwuemekaajah on github

Install

$ npm install beautifulstew

Usage

This is a library used for web scraping and any other use that the smart developers all over the world can think of. It helps the developer to select and extract content that is relevant to him/her from the http response of a web request.

Motivation for the Library

The motivation for this library is from the fact that the python community has a cool web scraping library called beautifulsoup and so I decided to replicate such in the JavaScript community even though I know that this library is nowhere near the functionalities of the beautifulsoup library.

Documentation

To create an instance of the beautifulstew:

You can use any http request libray of choice. For example using the nodejs request library var beautifulstew = require('beautifulstew'); var request = require('request'); request('www.google.com.ng',function(err,response,body){ if(!err && response.statusCode == 200){ var stew = new beautifulstew(body); } })

To get a particular set of tags

var request = require('request'); request('www.google.com.ng',function(err,response,body){ if(!err && response.statusCode == 200){ var stew = new beautifulstew(body); var tag = stew.findTag('a',{href:'google.com'}) console.log(tag); } })

the first argument is a html valid tag and it can be the only argument or we can include a second argument
which is an object with a html attribute name and value.

To get a particular attribute from an html tag

var request = require('request');
request('www.google.com.ng',function(err,response,body){
  if(!err && response.statusCode == 200){
    var stew = new beautifulstew(body);
    stew.findTag('a',{href:'google.com'})
    var tag = stew.getAttributes()
    console.log(tag);
  }
  })

the first argument is a html valid tag and it can be the only argument or we can include a second argument
which is an object with a html attribute name and value. It returns an array of attributes and their values that match your query.

To get the raw content from the http response body without the html formatting

var request = require('request');
request('www.google.com.ng',function(err,response,body){
  if(!err && response.statusCode == 200){
    var stew = new beautifulstew(body);
    var bareContent = stew.strips();
    console.log(bareContent);
    }
  });

  this returns the raw content of the http response body without any form of html formatting.It is cool when you want to use it in reading news on your command prompt or when you are scrapping a particular site for its main contents.

"# beautifulstew"