Short answer: Python!
Long answer: it depends.
If you're scraping simple websites with a simple HTTP request. Python is your best bet.
Libraries such as requests or HTTPX makes it very easy to scrape websites that don't require JavaScript to work correctly. Python offers a lot of simple-to-use
HTTP clients
.
And once you get the response, it's also very easy to
parse the HTML with BeautifulSoup
for example.
Here is a very quick example of how simple it is to scrape a website and extract its title:
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
response = requests.get("https://news.ycombinator.com/")
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.content, 'html.parser')
# The title tag of the page
print(soup.title)
> <title>Hacker News</title>
# The title of the page as string
print(soup.title.string)
> Hacker News
You can use JavaScript to do web scraping if you want to scrape websites that require a lot of JavaScript to work correctly.
To scrape such websites you will need to use what is called a "headless browser", meaning that a real web browser will fetch and render the website for you. The easiest and most popular library used to do this is Puppeteer, a JavaScript library.