Introduction to Cheerio

Cheerio is a fast, flexible, and lean implementation of core jQuery designed specifically for the server. It is used for web scraping and parsing HTML in a Node.js environment. With Cheerio, you can manipulate and extract data from HTML documents easily.

Installation

npm install cheerio

Basic Usage

Here’s how you can use Cheerio to load an HTML document and manipulate its elements:

    const cheerio = require('cheerio');
    const html = '
Apple
Orange
Banana
';
    const $ = cheerio.load(html);
    $('li').each(function(i, elem) {
      console.log($(this).text());
    });
  

APIs and Methods

1. load

Loads an HTML document and returns a Cheerio instance.

    const cheerio = require('cheerio');
    const $ = cheerio.load('...');
  

2. html

Get the HTML contents of the selected elements or set the HTML contents:

    $('ul').html();
    $('ul').html('
Pineapple
');
  

3. text

Get the combined text contents of each element in the set of matched elements:

    $('ul').text();
    $('ul').text('Grapes');
  

4. find

Get the descendants of each element filtered by a selector:

    $('ul').find('li');
  

5. attr

Get the value of an attribute for the first element in the set of matched elements or set one or more attributes for every matched element:

    $('a').attr('href');
    $('a').attr('href', 'https://example.com');
  

Application Example

An example of a simple web scraper using Cheerio:

    const axios = require('axios');
    const cheerio = require('cheerio');

    async function scrapeWebsite(url) {
      try {
        const { data } = await axios.get(url);
        const $ = cheerio.load(data);
        const scrapedData = [];

        $('article').each((i, element) => {
          const title = $(element).find('h1').text();
          const content = $(element).find('.content').text();
          scrapedData.push({ title, content });
        });

        console.log(scrapedData);
      } catch (error) {
        console.error('Error scraping website:', error);
      }
    }

    scrapeWebsite('https://example.com');
  

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