Is there any language which is just "perfect" for web scraping? [closed]

Question

I have used 3 languages for Web Scraping - Ruby, PHP and Python and honestly none of them seems to perfect for the task.

Ruby has an excellent mechanize and XML parsing library but the spreadsheet support is very poor.

PHP has excellent spreadsheet and HTML parsing library but it does not have an equivalent of WWW:Mechanize.

Python has a very poor Mechanize library. I had many problems with it and still unable to solve them. Its spreadsheet library also is more or less decent since it unable to create XLSX files.

Is there anything which is just perfect for webscraping.

PS: I am working on windows platform.

Answer 1

Check Python + Scrappy, it is pretty good:

http://scrapy.org/

Answer 2

Why not just use the XML Spreadsheet format? It's super simple to create, and it would probably be trivial with any type of class-based system.

Also, for Python have you tried BeautifulSoup for parsing? Urllib+BeautifulSoup makes a pretty powerful combo.