Since it first made its appearance, web scraping has quickly become one of the most effective, user-friendly tools for targeting top-rated websites and extracting data. It can benefit any type of business in a wide variety of ways, which is why scraping has quickly found its way into most modern businesses.
However, just like any other technology these days, web scraping is also constantly advancing, changing, expanding, and evolving. It used to be just a simple process with a simple code in the past. Today, it has become an immensely precise and complex process that can be conducted using many different software tools.
More importantly, web scraping can be created with various programming languages and performed through a range of proxies. Let’s discuss the importance of choosing the right language for your web scraping project and mention the best languages you should consider.
Why it’s important to choose the right language
Choosing the best coding language for your web scraping brings you quite a few benefits, such as:
- Increased flexibility
- Better operational ability to feed database
- Top-level crawling and scraping effectiveness
- Ease of coding
- Scalability
- Maintainability
- Avoiding blocking and detecting mechanisms
Since web scraping involves creating a scraping bot and launching it on the web to crawl the net, target websites, filter, and scrape relevant content to provide you with actionable data, choosing the correct language for the task is crucial to your scraping success.
The scraping process is performed by a scraping software tool that relies on the use of proxies to conduct its operation. The language you choose will determine the level of sophistication of your scraping bot. The more sophisticated the bot is, the more data it will effectively gather.
Thanks to the most recent advent of AI developments, it is now possible to take your scraping efforts to the next level by choosing the latest coding language for scraping. With that in mind, let’s quickly review some of the top programming languages for scraping.
Most popular scraping languages
Web scraping would be impossible without scraper bots. Bots are scraping tools that need to be properly coded to perform certain operations. They can also be AI-powered, but either option will require some basic programming to make them feasible and viable data extracting tools. Here is our list of the best scraping languages.
C#
C# was developed by Anders Hejlsberg in 1999. He was a vital contributor to C# language development. C# is an object-oriented, general-purpose, modern, and simple, high-level programming language that compiles down to CRL and can be interpreted by JIT in ASP.NET. It runs memory management automatically.
It doesn’t come with complex features, which is why it’s the most popular coding language in the world. You can find C# in almost every application, and you can use C# to create high-end scraping bots for large-scale C# web scraping operations.
Python
Python is a general-purpose, high-level, and popular coding language that is probably one of the most used languages in the world. It’s one of the most commonly used languages for data scraping as it makes the entire process of targeting websites, crawling content, and harvesting data streamlined, efficient, and undetectable.
Node.JS
Based on javascript, Node.JS is another fantastic coding option for web scraping javascript pages and websites. Even though Node.JS isn’t as popular as Python or C#, you can use it for specific scraping operations where harvesting data from javascript pages is required.
Ruby
Ruby is perfect for those who need a simple and easy-to-use programming language for creating scraper bots. Ruby offers something that other languages don’t – the ability to create bots that can search HTML documents by CSS selectors.
PHP
Last in line is PHP. Although not as popular as other languages mentioned here, you can use it to create intuitive scraper bots for specific web scraping purposes, such as harvesting data from websites with academic literature, papers, e-books, and so on.
Best uses for each scraping language
The best and easiest way to decide which language to use for your data harvesting needs is to see the most common use cases for each language we mentioned here. Let’s start with C#. Aside from C# web scraping, C# is mostly used for app and game development.
In the case of C# scraping, this language makes linking harvested data to APIs, front-end, and databases much simpler and easier. It also allows you to harvest data from multiple websites and supports API scraping and web scraping.
Python is an excellent solution for scraping as it offers access to both Beautiful Soup and Scrapy – two high-end Python libraries designed for fast and highly efficient data harvesting. Python can also execute almost any process related to data scraping and extraction.
Node.JS is renowned for its incredible speed. You can use it to create a scraper bot that is so fast and efficient that most target websites won’t even know what hit them. Scraper bots powered by Node.JS are also perfect for scraping multiple websites simultaneously and can handle HTTP URLs.
Ruby is an excellent choice for those who prefer productivity and simplicity when it comes to scraping. Ruby offers CSS and XPath selector support and Reader, SAX, XML, and HTML parsers. It’s the best solution for reliably scraping data from websites over a longer period.
PHP offers both simplicity and speed when it comes to scraping and harvesting data, and it reads a wide range of protocols, including FTP and HTTP. You can use PHP to create a web spider that automatically extracts all sorts of data from the internet.
Conclusion
Every language is unique, with its own features and uses. While no language is perfect in itself, the more you know about each one, the more you’re able to use their full potential to your advantage.
If you’re looking for the best scraping language, C# might just be for you. Python might be a more suitable option if you’re looking for the most popular scraping language. However, the choice of language for web scraping depends on your scraping needs.
TechnologyHQ is a platform about business insights, tech, 4IR, digital transformation, AI, Blockchain, Cybersecurity, and social media for businesses.
We manage social media groups with more than 200,000 members with almost 100% engagement.
