Crawl4AI

Episode 2: Overview of Advanced Features

Quick Intro

A general overview of advanced features like hooks, CSS selectors, and JSON CSS extraction.

Here's a condensed outline for an Overview of Advanced Features video covering Crawl4AI's powerful customization and extraction options:

Overview of Advanced Features

1) Introduction to Advanced Features:

  • Briefly introduce Crawl4AI’s advanced tools, which let users go beyond basic crawling to customize and fine-tune their scraping workflows.

2) Taking Screenshots:

  • Explain the screenshot capability for capturing page state and verifying content.
  • Example: 
    result = await crawler.arun(url="https://www.example.com", screenshot=True)
  • Mention that screenshots are saved as a base64 string in result, allowing easy decoding and saving.

3) Media and Link Extraction:

  • Demonstrate how to pull all media (images, videos) and links (internal and external) from a page for deeper analysis or content gathering.
  • Example: 
    result = await crawler.arun(url="https://www.example.com")
print("Media:", result.media)
print("Links:", result.links)

4) Custom User Agent:

  • Show how to set a custom user agent to disguise the crawler or simulate specific devices/browsers.
  • Example: 
    result = await crawler.arun(url="https://www.example.com", user_agent="Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MyCrawler/1.0)")

5) Custom Hooks for Enhanced Control:

  • Briefly cover how to use hooks, which allow custom actions like setting headers or handling login during the crawl.
  • Example: Setting a custom header with before_get_url hook. 
    async def before_get_url(page):
    await page.set_extra_http_headers({"X-Test-Header": "test"})

6) CSS Selectors for Targeted Extraction:

  • Explain the use of CSS selectors to extract specific elements, ideal for structured data like articles or product details.
  • Example: 
    result = await crawler.arun(url="https://www.example.com", css_selector="h2")
print("H2 Tags:", result.extracted_content)

7) Crawling Inside Iframes:

  • Mention how enabling process_iframes=True allows extracting content within iframes, useful for sites with embedded content or ads.
  • Example: 
    result = await crawler.arun(url="https://www.example.com", process_iframes=True)

8) Wrap-Up:

  • Summarize these advanced features and how they allow users to customize every part of their web scraping experience.
  • Tease upcoming videos where each feature will be explored in detail.

This covers each advanced feature with a brief example, providing a useful overview to prepare viewers for the more in-depth videos.