Is there comprehensive documentation available for Pholcus?

Pholcus is a distributed, high-concurrency and powerful web crawler software written in the Go language. It's designed for high-throughput web content extraction, used in data mining, data processing, and knowledge acquisition tasks.

As of my last update, Pholcus does not have an extensive, official English documentation available, which can be a hurdle for non-Chinese speaking developers. The primary source of information about Pholcus is in Chinese, and the most comprehensive resources can be found on its GitHub repository (https://github.com/henrylee2cn/pholcus) and associated Wiki.

Here's a brief overview of how you can get started with Pholcus:

1. Installation: To install Pholcus, you need to have Go installed. You can then use go get to install Pholcus.

   go get github.com/henrylee2cn/pholcus
   

2. Basic Usage: You can create a simple spider by implementing the Spider interface. Here's a minimal example in Go:

   package main
   
   import (
       "github.com/henrylee2cn/pholcus/exec"
       "github.com/henrylee2cn/pholcus/spider"
   )
   
   func main() {
       exec.DefaultRun("web")
   }
   
   func init() {
       spider.Species["Example"] = &spider.Spider{
           Name:        "Example",
           Description: "Example spider to scrape website data",
           // Define the entry point and parsing rules here
       }
   }
   

3. Advanced Usage: Pholcus supports various advanced features, such as keyword-driven search, distributed operation, and custom data output formats.

For more comprehensive guidance, you might need to translate the Chinese documentation or rely on the community around Pholcus for support. You could use online translation tools like Google Translate or ask for help in developer communities where members might be familiar with Pholcus and able to assist in English.

If you're comfortable reading the code, exploring the examples in the Pholcus repository can be very instructive. Source code often contains comments and usage examples that can help you understand how to use the software.

If you're looking for an alternative web scraping tool with extensive English documentation, you might consider Scrapy (for Python), Beautiful Soup (for Python), or Puppeteer (for Node.js). These tools are widely used in the developer community and have a wealth of tutorials, guides, and community support available.