Before we check out which are the programming languages, let’s first understand what is web scraping.
When you are looking for ways to extract data from the internet, and use that to create an interesting data visualization, you would need a web scraper for that.
And for that, you need the right kind of programming languages, unless you want to waste the resources and use a language that does not yield the desired outcome. So, let’s check out which are the best languages you would need, if you want to develop a great web scraper for your work.
Python
When it comes to web scraping, python is the most popular one. This is basically an all rounder language which you can use for endless purposes. This language has the potential to handle every kind of web crawling related issues easily. Some of the widely used frameworks that are based on Python include Beautiful Soap, and Scrapy.
These frameworks make web scraping very easy using python. They are the highly evolved scraping libraries, which makes Python an overall best language for this purpose.
PHP
Just like this is a convenient language for website development, it is also convenient for web scraping. BUT, this is least preferable when it comes to building a web scraper.
And some of the reasons for the same is async, and the weak support for multi threading. These issues can create troubles when you are multi tasking, task scheduling, or queuing. Probably that is the reason why this is not generally recommended for web scraping.
C and C++
If you are starting a company, that is purely based on web scraping, then probably C and C++ are some of the best languages for you. BUT, the cost of developing a web scraper, that is based on these languages, is very high. Hence, most companies do not prefer creating crawlers that are based on C or C++, if they have to work on it for a short time period only.