Analyze which one is better for writing crawlers in Python or Node.js?

In today's Internet era, as more and more information needs to be obtained automatically and in batches, web crawlers have become an increasingly popular technology. Among many programming languages, Python and Node.js have a high usage rate in the field of web crawlers. So which one is better for writing crawlers, Python or Node.js? This article will conduct some discussion and analysis on this issue based on personal experience and understanding.

1. Comparison of basic language knowledge and programming thinking

For the two programming languages of Python and Node.js, Python is a high-level programming language, and Node.js It is a development framework based on JavaScript. In terms of programming thinking, Python pays more attention to object-oriented programming ideas, and the processing of data types, string operations, lists, etc. are very convenient, while Node.js pays more attention to event-driven, asynchronous programming ideas, and the use of callback functions and Promise to provide data The processing brings higher efficiency and performance, and is easy to implement in actual business.

2. Comparison of data acquisition and processing functions

In terms of data acquisition and processing, Python has a powerful ability to process HTML, XML and other documents, through various third-party packages For example, BeautifulSoup, requests, lxml, etc. can parse HTML documents and extract the data we need. They can also easily store data into the database through the OIRDB model. Node.js pays more attention to the characteristics of asynchronous programming for data acquisition and processing. It can also parse and extract HTML documents and extract data through modules such as request, cheerio, node-fetch, and also through MySQL, MongoDB, etc. of Node.js. Modules store data into a database.

3. Comparison of data crawling efficiency

For crawler efficiency, Python uses multi-threading or multi-process processing, and its coroutines can well support IO-intensive tasks. It is very suitable for use in web crawlers, and many Python libraries can also support concurrency well, such as gunicorn, gevent, etc., coupled with Python's powerful concurrency processing capabilities, making its processing efficiency very high. However, Python cannot truly implement multi-threaded concurrent operations due to GIL (Global Interpreter Lock), which also results in reduced efficiency in processing CPU-intensive tasks. Node.js, on the other hand, can well support asynchronous programming and event programming due to its single thread. Its I/O processing efficiency is very high, but its performance in CPU-intensive calculations is slightly lower. At the same time, its asynchronous programming ideas also require understanding. Concepts such as synchronization, asynchronous, callback, and Promise.

Comprehensive comparison, Python has unlimited scalability and strong community support in crawling. For some more complex website crawling, Python’s performance is very good. At the same time, the Python language and its various third-party libraries The combination is very flexible, and the development difficulty of crawlers is relatively low. Node.js, on the other hand, has the unique characteristics of asynchronous programming, has high requirements for data processing efficiency, and is widely used in the field of IO-intensive website crawling.

In short, regarding the question of whether Python or Node.js is better for writing crawlers, which technology to use should depend on the situation, and the appropriate technology stack should be selected according to actual needs.

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