Web Scraping with Rust & ChatGPT

Rust is a great language for web scraping thanks to its speed, memory safety and concurrency features. ChatGPT is an AI assistant that can provide explanations and generate code for scraping tasks. This article covers web scraping in Rust with ChatGPT's help.

Setting Up a Rust Environment

You'll need Rust installed along with these crates:

// reqwest for HTTP requests
cargo add reqwest

// selectors for DOM parsing
cargo add selectors

// csv for CSV output
cargo add csv

Introduction to Web Scraping in Rust

Web scraping involves sending HTTP requests to websites and extracting data from the HTML, JSON or XML responses. Useful Rust crates:

Typical web scraping workflow:

Using ChatGPT for Web Scraping Help

ChatGPT is an AI assistant created by OpenAI to be helpful, harmless, and honest. It can provide explanations and generate code snippets for web scraping:

Getting Explanations

Ask ChatGPT to explain web scraping concepts or specifics:

Generating Code Snippets

Give a description of what you want to scrape and have ChatGPT provide starter Rust code:

Validate any code before using.

Improving Prompts

Ask ChatGPT to suggest ways to improve your prompt if it doesn't provide helpful responses.

Asking Follow-up Questions

Chat with ChatGPT to get explanations for any other questions you have.

Explaining Errors

Share any errors and ask ChatGPT to debug and explain the problem.

Web Scraping Example Using ChatGPT

Let's walk through scraping a Wikipedia page with ChatGPT's assistance.

Goal

Extract the chronology table from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe

Step 1: Download page

ChatGPT: Rust code to download this page:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe>

// ChatGPT provides this code
use reqwest;

let resp = reqwest::get("<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe>")?;
let html = resp.text()?;

Step 2: Inspect HTML, table has class wikitable

Step 3: Extract table data to CSV

ChatGPT: Rust code to extract wikitable table to CSV

// ChatGPT provides this code
use selectors;
use csv;

let doc = selectors::Document::from(html.as_str());

let table = doc.select("table.wikitable").first().unwrap();

let mut headers = Vec::new();
table.select("thead th").for_each(|h| headers.push(h.text()));

let mut rows = Vec::new();
table.select("tbody tr").for_each(|r| {
  let mut row = Vec::new();
  r.select("td").for_each(|c| {
    row.push(c.text());
  });
  rows.push(row);
});

// write rows to CSV
// ...

This demonstrates using ChatGPT to get Rust scraping code quickly.

Conclusion

Key points:

ChatGPT + Rust is a powerful combo for building web scrapers.

However, some limitations:

A more robust solution is using a web scraping API like Proxies API

Proxies API provides:

Easily scrape any site:

let client = reqwest::Client::new();
let resp = client.get("<https://api.proxiesapi.com/?url=example.com&key=XXX>");

Get started now with 1000 free API calls to supercharge your web scraping!