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Custom Strategy Sets

Waterfall-Fetch allows you to customize the order and selection of strategies used to fetch HTML content. This advanced feature gives you fine-grained control over the fetching process, allowing you to optimize for your specific use case.

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Built-in Strategy Sets

By default, Waterfall-Fetch comes with two built-in strategy sets:
  1. Cheap Set: Optimized for cost-effectiveness and speed
    • Axios
    • Node-fetch
    • Puppeteer (as a last resort)
  2. JS Set: Designed for JavaScript-heavy websites (slower, but more accurate)
    • Puppeteer (with stealth mode)
    • Axios (as a fallback)
    • Node-fetch (as a final attempt)

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Using Built-in Sets

To use a built-in set, you can specify it in the options parameter of the getHtml function: 
import getHtml from "waterfall-fetch";

const url = "https://example.com";

// Using the 'cheap' set
const result1 = await getHtml(url, { set: "cheap" });

// Using the 'js' set
const result2 = await getHtml(url, { set: "js" });

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Custom Strategy Sets

You can create your own custom strategy set by passing an array of strategy functions to the set option. This allows you to prioritize strategies based on your specific needs. To create a custom set:
  1. Import the strategy functions you want to use
  2. Create an array with your desired order of strategies
  3. Pass this array to the set option
Here’s an example: 
import getHtml, { fetchWithAxios, fetchWithNodeFetch, fetchWithStealthPuppeteer } from "waterfall-fetch";

const url = "https://example.com";

// Define a custom set of strategies
const customSet = [fetchWithNodeFetch, fetchWithAxios, fetchWithStealthPuppeteer];

// Use the custom set
const result = await getHtml(url, { set: customSet });

console.log(result.html);
console.log(result.strategy.name); // Logs the name of the successful strategy

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Strategy Order and Fallback Behavior

The order of strategies in your custom set is crucial:
  1. Strategies are attempted in the order they appear in the array.
  2. If a strategy fails, Waterfall-Fetch moves to the next strategy in the array.
  3. If all strategies fail, Waterfall-Fetch will throw an error.
  4. You can include the same strategy multiple times in the array, which can be useful for retrying a strategy with different options or configurations.
By carefully crafting your custom strategy set, you can optimize the fetching process for your specific use case and improve the accuracy and efficiency of your HTML fetching.