Building a web crawler that captures meaningful content from dynamic, JavaScript-heavy websites presents challenges due to layout-focused structures. The Playwright framework enables control over Chromium, allowing for refined extraction of text and links. An extractor can traverse the DOM, skip irrelevant elements, and focus on semantically significant content. The combination of Playwright with Apache Pekko facilitates handling concurrency and enhancing message passing during the crawling process. Although still in development, this tool is valuable for creating pipelines for LLM preparation and actor-based scraping systems.
The result is a web crawler that can open headless browsers, click to expand content, traverse and extract text from a target DOM element, retry failed requests, and extract internal links for recursive crawling.
Dynamic, JavaScript-heavy websites are structured primarily for layout, leading to a messy mix of navigation links, ads, cookie banners, and footers when content is directly pulled.
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