What are Request and Cheerio in Node.js NPM?

Request and Cheerio are two popular Node.js modules that are frequently used together for web data processing and web scraping. In this article, we will discuss Request and Cheerio in Node.js NPM with their key features, installations, syntaxes, and examples.

What is Request in Node.js NPM?

Request is a Node.js package that is used to deliver HTTP requests to servers. Retrieving data from websites or APIs is made simpler by its support for GET, POST, and other HTTP methods. Web scraping and API integration are common uses for it because it control features like streams, cookies, and redirects. Even while Request was simple to use, it has been deprecated since 2020; instead, more modern projects are encouraged to use Axios, Got, and node-fetch. Its ease of use and adaptability made it popular in the past, especially when paired with parsing tools like Cheerio for HTML content scraping.

Key Features:

Several key features of Request in Node.js NPM are as follows:

• Basic HTTP task APIs, including GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE.
• Promises, respectively, in combination with request-promise libraries.
• It controls streams, redirects, and cookies.
• It is appropriate for web scraping activities that require retrieving HTML material.

Installation:

Require of request in environment:

Syntax:

It has the following syntax:

Example containing request:

What is Cheerio in Node.js NPM?

A fast and efficient Node.js tool for working with HTML or XML is called Cheerio. It is inspired by jQuery, and allows developers to use popular DOM traversal and manipulation techniques to retrieve data from web pages. While Cheerio does not directly handle HTTP queries, it often uses frameworks such as Request or Axios to handle fetched HTML. It makes it easier to efficiently extract links, titles, and structured data from HTML. Cheerio is a popular tool for interacting with server-side DOM in Node.js environments because of its speed and simplicity of usage. Hence, it is perfect for creating web scrapers.

Key Features:

Several key features of Cheerio in Node.js NPM are as follows:

• It uses jQuery's API to manipulate HTML.
• Both lightweight and efficient.
• It collects data quickly through HTML or XML parsing.
• It combines with HTTP request libraries with easily.

Installation:

Require of cheerio in Environment:

Syntax:

It has the following syntax:

Example:

Example syntax containing both the Request and Cheerio for Web Scraping:

Example code:

Output:

 
Page Title: Example Domain
Heading 1: Example Domain
Link 1: https://www.example.com/domains/example   

The Axios Modern Alternative to Request:

Output:

 
Page Title: Example Domain
Heading 1: Example Domain
Link 1: https://www.example.com/domains/example   

Explanation:

The code included shows how to use Request or its more modern replacement, Axios, in combination with Cheerio to perform web scraping in Node.js. Giving the destination URL (https://example.com) to be scraped is how the script begins. In order to obtain the HTML content of the page, it uses Request (or Axios in the more recent version) to send an HTTP GET request. When the response is received, the Cheerio library inserts the HTML content into a virtual DOM, allowing the script to use selectors similar to jQuery to extract certain elements. Throughout the example, the script gathers and records the page title (<title> element), all links (<a> tags with their href properties), and all headers (<h1> tags). Iteratively, every link or header is logged by navigating the DOM tree using Cheerio's each method.