Covid-19 cases update using Cheerio Library

In this article we are going to learn about that how can we get the common information from the covid website i.e Total Cases, Recovered, and Deaths using the concept of scraping with help of JavaScript Library.

Library Requirements and installation: There are two libraries that are required to scrap(or get the required information from the website) the covid-19 website:

• Request Library
• Cheerio Library

Request Library: This Request library will help us to get the HTML of the website by sending the HTTP request to that website. Because of this library, our manual tasks reduce.

Installation:

npm install request

Syntax:

request(url of website, function to get the response)

Note: The second parameter which is the function indicates that you can get the HTML, body, head, etc as a result by sending the request to a website.

Cheerio Library: This Cheerio library is used to wrap by obtaining the required data either in form of array type or individual data from the HTML that we had got by using the request library.

Installation:

npm install cheerio

Syntax:

cheerio.load(response on request)

Note: Load the HTML or any code that you had got as a response and then get the required data by passing the specific className or idName

Example: Let’s see the implementation to obtain the required data from the covid-19 website as explained below:

Javascript

const request = require("request");
const cheerio = require("cheerio");
// requesting the covid-19 website
request("https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/", cb);
function cb(err, response, html) {
    if (err) {
        console.log(err);
    }
    else {
        handlehtml(html);  // Getting the html on request
    }
}
function handlehtml(html) {
    // loading the html that we had obtained by requesting
    let seltools = cheerio.load(html);
    // Obtaining the required data from
    // html which is stored in the seltools
    let content = seltools("#maincounter-wrap span");
    let obj = ["Coronavirus Cases: ", "Deaths: ", "Recovered: "];
    for (let i = 0; i < content.length; i++) {
        let data = seltools(content[i]).text();
        console.log(obj[i] + data);
    }
}

Step to run the application: Write the below step in the terminal to run the application.

node fileName.js

Output:

Output

Explanation: First we requested the covid-19 website to get the HTML of that by using the request library and then we loaded the HTML by using the cheerio library to obtain the required data from that HTML by using the class name of the element in which the data was stored and as a result, we got the total cases, recovered and deaths as an output as you see above.