scraper-js

overview

need thumbnails? scraper is a lightweight npm module designed to return high quality and highly relevant images from a source url fast.

installation

npm install scraper-js

use

var Scraper = require('scraper-js').Scraper;
var scraper = new Scraper.Scraper();
scraper.scrape(address).then(function (thumbs) {
	console.log(thumbs);
});

example node server

//
// scraperapp
// 
// thumbnail scraping http server. usage is as follows:
// get the address to scrape from the parameters passed to the url
// e.g. localhost:1337/scrape?url=http://www.reddit.com; address to scrape => http://www.reddit.com
// response will be an array of image urls => [http://image1.jpg, http://image2.jpg, ...]
//
// authored by Jason Ibrahim
// copyright (c) 2015 Jason Ibrahim
// 

// initialize dependencies
var http =	require('http'),
    https =	require('https'),
    url = require('url'),
    Scraper = require('scraper-js');
    
// set the port
var port = process.env.port || 80;

// create the server
var server = http.createServer(function (req, res) {
    
	var scrapereg = new RegExp(/^(\/scrape)/),
        query = url.parse(req.url, true).query,
        address = query.url,
        scraper = new Scraper.Scraper();
	// only listen for api calls to /scrape
	if(!req.url.match(scrapereg)) {
		res.writeHead(404);
		res.end('Did you mean /scrape?');
	}
	res.writeHead(200, {'Access-Control-Allow-Origin': "*"});
    // scraper returns a promise that will resolve an array of image urls
	scraper.scrape(address).then(function (images) {
		res.end(JSON.stringify(images));
	}, function(error) {
		res.writeHead(404);
		res.end(JSON.stringify([error]));
	});
	// if we don't get at least one thumbnail within 8 seconds, quit
	setTimeout(function() {
        res.writeHead(408);
		res.end(JSON.stringify(['timeout.']));
	}, 8000);
    
}).listen(port);

console.log('Scraping on', port);

details

scrape() will return a promise, that when fulfilled, will return an array of candidate thumbnails- in the form of url's- in descending order of rating; i.e. the best candidate thumbnail will appear first.

contributions

improvements, features, bug fixes and any other type of contribution are welcome to this project. please feel free to extend what has been started here and if it solves a particular problem, please submit a pull request so we can share it with others.