The world of web scraping is varied and complex, and Proxies API sits at one of the most crucial junctions. They are allowing web scrapers/crawlers to bypass IP blocks by using a single API endpoint to access our 20 million-plus high-speed proxies on rotation.
Example:
curl "http://api.proxiesapi.com/?auth_key=YOUR_KEY&url=URL"
One of the questions we get frequently is how we are different from services like OctoParse or Diffbot. Many times it is like comparing Apples and Oranges. Still, when we send this comparison table to our customer's developer team, their CXO, their marketing, or SEO team, they typically get it quite quickly if we are a convenient service or not.
So here is how we are different from Mechanical Soup.
Mechanical soup is a super simple library that helps you scrape, store and pass cookies, submit forms, etc. but it doesn't support Javascript rendering.
Here is an example of submitting a form and scraping the results on Duck Duck Go
import mechanicalsoup
# Connect to duckduckgo
browser = mechanicalsoup.StatefulBrowser()
browser.open("")
# Fill-in the search form
browser.select_form('#search_form_homepage')
browser["q"] = "MechanicalSoup"
browser.submit_selected()
# Display the results
for link in browser.page.select('a.result__a'):
print(link.text, '->', link.attrs['href'])
Link here https://github.com/MechanicalSoup/MechanicalSoup
Mechanical Soup vs. Proxies API
Aspect | Proxies API | Mechanical Soup |
---|---|---|
Who is it for? | Developers | Developers |
Cost | 1000 free CallsStarts at $49 pm | Open Source |
API access | Yes | yes |
Size of project | enterprisemediumsmall | enterprisemediumsmall |
Easy to setup | single api call for everything | manual setup |
Product/Service | product | product |
Rotating Proxies | Yes | no |
Single API? | Yes | no |
Desktop App | no | no |
Visual Scraping | no | no |
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