Can Cheerio be used in conjunction with request or axios for web scraping?

Yes, Cheerio can be used in conjunction with request or axios for web scraping in Node.js. Cheerio provides a jQuery-like syntax for parsing and manipulating the structure of an HTML document, which makes it very convenient for web scraping tasks. You would typically use a library like request or axios to fetch the HTML content from a web page, and then you would use Cheerio to parse the HTML and extract the data you need.

Here's how you can use Cheerio with axios for web scraping:

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

const url = 'https://example.com';

axios.get(url)
  .then(response => {
    const html = response.data;
    const $ = cheerio.load(html);
    // Now you can use the Cheerio API to select and manipulate elements
    $('selector').each((index, element) => {
      // Process the element
      const data = $(element).text();
      console.log(data);
    });
  })
  .catch(console.error);

As for the request library, please note that it has been deprecated as of 2020, so it's recommended to use alternatives like axios, node-fetch, or got. However, if you are maintaining legacy code that uses request, you can still use Cheerio with it as shown below:

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

const url = 'https://example.com';

request(url, (error, response, body) => {
  if (!error && response.statusCode == 200) {
    const $ = cheerio.load(body);
    // Now you can use the Cheerio API to select and manipulate elements
    $('selector').each((index, element) => {
      // Process the element
      const data = $(element).text();
      console.log(data);
    });
  } else {
    console.error('Failed to fetch page: ', error);
  }
});

In both examples above, you would replace 'selector' with the appropriate CSS selector for the elements you want to extract from the page. Cheerio provides many methods to traverse and manipulate the DOM similar to jQuery, so you can use methods like .find(), .text(), .attr(), etc., to get the content you're interested in.

Remember that when scraping websites, you should always check the website's robots.txt file to see if scraping is allowed and comply with their terms of service. Additionally, you should be respectful and avoid making too many requests in a short period to prevent overloading the server.