Can Pholcus be used to scrape APIs instead of HTML pages?

Pholcus is a high-concurrency, distributed, web crawler software written in Go, primarily used for scraping HTML pages. Although it is designed mainly for HTML content, it can technically be used to scrape APIs as long as the API returns data over HTTP(S). However, Pholcus may not be the most efficient or straightforward tool for API scraping, especially if the API returns data in formats like JSON or XML, since Pholcus is optimized for HTML parsing.

API scraping typically involves making HTTP requests to the API endpoint and then parsing the JSON, XML, or other data formats that are returned. For API scraping, you might want to use tools or libraries that are more suited for handling APIs and their response formats, such as requests in Python or axios in JavaScript.

If you still want to use Pholcus for API scraping, you can do so by making HTTP GET or POST requests to the API endpoint and then handling the response. However, you will need to manually handle the data parsing and extraction, as you would with other formats.

Here's a conceptual example of how you might use Pholcus to scrape an API:

package main

import (
    "github.com/henrylee2cn/pholcus/exec"
    "github.com/henrylee2cn/pholcus/logs"
    "github.com/henrylee2cn/pholcus/spider"
    "github.com/henrylee2cn/pholcus/spider_lib"
)

func main() {
    sp := spider.NewSpider(NewAPISpider(), "API_Spider")
    exec.AddSpider(sp)
    exec.Run()
}

type APISpider struct {
    *spider.Spider
}

func NewAPISpider() *APISpider {
    return &APISpider{
        Spider: spider.NewSpider(nil, "APISpider"),
    }
}

func (s *APISpider) OnStart(ctx *spider.Context) {
    // Make an API request
    ctx.AddQueue(&spider.Request{
        Url:          "http://api.example.com/data", // API endpoint
        Rule:         "ProcessAPIResponse",
        Method:       "GET", // or "POST"
        Header:       http.Header{"Content-Type": []string{"application/json"}},
        DownloaderID: 0,
    })
}

func (s *APISpider) ProcessAPIResponse(ctx *spider.Context) {
    // Process the API response
    data := ctx.GetText()
    logs.Log.Informational("API response: %s", data)

    // TODO: Parse the API response and extract the data you need.
    // If the API returns JSON, you'll need to unmarshal it into a Go struct.
}

In this example, I've created a basic Pholcus spider that makes a GET request to an API endpoint and logs the response. You would need to replace the URL with the actual API endpoint you want to scrape and, based on the response format (e.g., JSON), parse the response data accordingly.

For a more suitable approach to API scraping, consider using the following Python example with the requests library:

import requests

# Make a GET request to the API
response = requests.get('http://api.example.com/data')

# Check if the request was successful
if response.status_code == 200:
    # Parse the JSON response
    data = response.json()
    # Do something with the data
    print(data)
else:
    print(f'Failed to retrieve data: {response.status_code}')

This Python code is more straightforward for API scraping, as it leverages the requests library to handle HTTP requests and JSON parsing seamlessly. It's generally recommended to use tools that align closely with the task at hand, so if you're primarily dealing with APIs, consider using libraries designed for API interaction and data handling.