cURL is by far the most popular HTTP client in the world. It's a command-line tool and library for transferring data with URLs, supporting a wide range of protocols including HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and more.
While cURL itself is rarely used directly in web scraping, it serves as the foundation for many HTTP clients and libraries across different programming languages through libcurl
library. This makes it a crucial component in many web scraping stacks.
cURL is a very feature rich HTTP client offering implementations of HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, and HTTP/3 protocols, as well as support for various authentication methods, cookies, and more. It's only matched by HTTP clients within real web browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.
See below for more on cURL in the context of web scraping and data programming 👇