curl-reap 0.1.0

Reap the web: browser-grade TLS impersonation, self-healing selectors, and a concurrent crawl engine in one library.

Reap the web. Browser-grade TLS impersonation, self-healing selectors, and a concurrent crawl engine, in one small library.

pip install curl_reap

---

Why

Modern scraping needs three things, and today you reach for three different tools:

1. Get past the door. Sites fingerprint your TLS handshake and block stock Python clients. curl_cffi solves this with real Chrome/Safari fingerprints.
2. Survive markup changes. Plain CSS and XPath break the moment a site renames a class. Scrapling pioneered self-healing selectors that re-find the element anyway.
3. Crawl at scale. Concurrency, throttling, retries, dedup, and pipelines. That is Scrapy.

curl_reap takes the best idea from each and puts them behind one friendly API.

	curl_cffi	Scrapy	Scrapling	curl_reap
Real browser TLS / JA3	yes	no	partial	yes
Parser built in	no	yes	yes	yes
Self-healing selectors	no	no	yes	yes
Concurrent crawl engine	no	yes	no	yes
AutoThrottle, retries, pipelines	no	yes	no	yes
One small dependency set	yes	no	no	yes

Install

pip install curl_reap

Requires Python 3.9+. Pulls in curl_cffi, lxml, and cssselect.

Quick start

A one-shot fetch parses like parsel, but the request carries a genuine browser fingerprint:

import curl_reap as reap

page = reap.get("https://quotes.toscrape.com", impersonate="chrome124")
print(page.css("span.text::text").getall())
print(page.css_first("small.author::text"))

Self-healing selectors

Save an element once. Later, even if the site renames the class or moves the node, auto_match relocates it by structural signature:

page = reap.get("https://shop.example.com/item/42")
page.css_first("a.buy-btn").save("buy_button")     # remember its shape

# weeks later, the class is now "purchase-cta" and the old selector misses:
later = reap.get("https://shop.example.com/item/99")
btn = later.css_first("a.buy-btn", auto_match=True, identifier="buy_button")
print(btn.attr("href"))                            # found anyway

Other finders: page.find_by_text("Sign in") and page.find_similar(some_element).

Crawl at scale

A Spider yields items (dicts) and more Request objects. The engine handles concurrency, AutoThrottle, retries, dedup, and pipelines:

import curl_reap as reap
from curl_reap import JsonLinesPipeline

class Quotes(reap.Spider):
    start_urls = ["https://quotes.toscrape.com"]

    def parse(self, page):
        for q in page.css("div.quote"):
            yield {
                "text": q.css_first("span.text::text"),
                "author": q.css_first("small.author::text"),
            }
        nxt = page.css_first("li.next a::attr(href)")
        if nxt:
            yield reap.Request("https://quotes.toscrape.com" + nxt, self.parse)

items = reap.run(
    Quotes,
    concurrency=8,
    throttle=True,                       # AutoThrottle adapts to server latency
    pipelines=[JsonLinesPipeline("quotes.jsonl")],
)
print(len(items), "items reaped")

API at a glance

• reap.get(url, impersonate="chrome124", **kw) and reap.post(...) return a Response you can .css() / .xpath() directly.
• reap.Session(impersonate=..., headers=..., retries=...) for a reusable client.
• Selector / SelectorList: .css, .css_first, .xpath, .find_by_text, .find_similar, .save, .re, .text, .attr.
• reap.Spider, reap.Request, reap.run(spider, ...), reap.Reaper(...).
• Pipelines: DedupPipeline, JsonLinesPipeline, CsvPipeline, or subclass Pipeline.

Responsible use

curl_reap impersonates a real browser at the TLS level, which is exactly what a normal browser does. It does not ship a challenge solver and it will not break CAPTCHAs or anti-bot walls (Cloudflare challenges, DataDome, PerimeterX, and similar). If a site has deliberately put up an access-control wall, that is a signal to stop. Respect robots.txt and each site's terms, throttle your crawls, and only collect data you are allowed to collect.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.