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Go Web Scraping Quick Start Guide

You're reading from   Go Web Scraping Quick Start Guide Implement the power of Go to scrape and crawl data from the web

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jan 2019
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781789615708
Length 132 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Author (1):
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Vincent Smith Vincent Smith
Author Profile Icon Vincent Smith
Vincent Smith
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Table of Contents (10) Chapters Close

Avoiding loops

If you are building a web scraper that follows links, you might need to be aware of which pages you've already visited. It's quite possible that a page you are visiting contains a link to a page you have already visited, sending you into an infinite loop. Therefore, it is very important to build a tracking system into your scraper that records its history.

The simplest data structure for storing a unique collection of items would be a set. The Go standard library does not have a set data structure, but it can be emulated by using a map[string]interface{}{}.

An interface{} in Go is a generic object, similar to java.lang.Object.

In Go, you can define a map as follows:

visitedMap := map[string]interface{}{}

In this case, we would use the visited URL as the key, and anything you want as the value. We will just use nil, because as long as the key is present...

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