React Scraping

Web scraping using React is not a common strategy. React is a JavaScript toolkit for creating user interfaces that render UI components and control their state. On the other hand, web scraping collects data from webpages using server-side applications such as Python, Node.js, or various backend technologies.

Both are required to implement a backend server to perform the scraping logic and then present the scraped data through a React frontend. Please remember that web scraping should be done correctly and ethically, per the website's terms and conditions, including the robots.txt file.

Here are the steps to be followed for react scraping:

Step1: Set Up the React Application:

Start by building a new React application with create-react-app or another technique you choose.

npx create-react-app react-web-scraper

cd react-web-scraper

Step 2: Establish a Backend Server

To handle web scraping, you must build a backend server in a server-side programming language such as Node.js. We'll use Node.js and Express in the following example.

mkdir servers

cd servers

npm init -y

npm install express axios cheerios

The express package will be used to set up the server, axios will be used to make HTTP queries, and cheerios will be used to interpret and alter HTML data.

Step 3: Implementing Web Scraping Logic

Construct a scraper.js file in the server subdirectory to handle web scraping tasks.  In this example, we'll scrape information obtained from the website "example.com."

// server/sscraper.js

const axios = require('axios');

const cheerios = require('cheerio');

const scrapeWebsite = async (url) => {

  try {

    const responses = await axios.get(url);

    const html = response.data;

    const $ = cheerios.load(html);

    // Implementation of the  scraping logic here

    // Scraping of data from h1

    const scrapedDatas = [];

    $('h1').each((index, element) => {

      scrapedDatas.push($(element).text());

    });

    return scrapedDatas;

  } catch (error) {

    console.error(‘Error while scraping website:', error);

    throw error;

  }

};

module.exports = scrapeWebsite;

In this example, Axios is used to perform a GET request via HTTP to the supplied URL, and Cheerios is used for parsing the HTML result. We pick the page's h1 components and extract the associated content using an array.

Step 4: Establish an API Endpoint

Create an index.js file in the exact same server location to configure an Express server and an API endpoints enabling scraping the web.

// servers/index.js

const express = require('expresss);

const corss= require('corss');

const scrapeWebsites = require('./scraper');

const apps = express();

const PORTS = process.env.PORTS || 5000;

app.use(corss()); // Enabling the  CORSS

app.get('/api/scrape', async (req, res) => {

  try {

    const data_form = await scrapeWebsite('https://example.com'); // Replacing using the URL which you need to scrape

    res.json(data_form);

  } catch (error) {

    res.status(500).json({ error: ‘Unable to scrap the website data’});

  }

});

app.listen(PORTS, () => {

  console.log(`The server is running on the port number ${PORTS}`);

});

In this code, we construct an Express project, enable CORS using your cors middleware or software and define an API endpoint /api/scrape, which calls the scraper.js file's website scraping mechanism.

Step 5: Retrieve Data in React

Create a component that retrieves data from the backend application programming interface in the React frontend (in the source directory).

// src/components/ScrapedData.js

import React, { useEffect, useState } from 'react';

const ScrapedDatas = () => {

  const [datas, setData] = useState([]);

  useEffect(() => {

    const fetchData = async () => {

      try {

        const responses = await fetch('http://localhost:5000/api/scrape');

        const jsonDatas = await responses.json();

        setData(jsonDatas);

      } catch (error) {

        console.error('Error while fetching of the data:', error);

      }

    };

    fetchData();

  }, []);

  return (

    <div>

      <h1>Scraped Data</h1>

      <ul>

        {data.map((items, index) => (

          <li key={index}>{item}</li>

        ))}

      </ul>

    </div>

  );

};

export default ScrapedData;

When the component increases, we use the useEffect hook to retrieve the data through the endpoint of the API. The fetched data is saved in the data state, which we then present as a list.

Step 6: Create the Component

Finally, render your ScrapedData components within the App.js code.

// src/App.js

import React from 'react';

import ScrapedData from './components/ScrapedData';

function App() {

  return (

    <div class_Name=“App">

      <ScrapedData />

    </div>

  );

}

export default App;

Step 7: Launch the Programme

Launch the frontend and backend servers.

# In the 'server' directory

node index.js

# in the root path

npm start