coston
commented
5 months ago Hey @g-vernon, thank you for your interest in the topic.
Parsing JavaScript bundles to extract email addresses is not a common approach for website scrapers. Parsing JavaScript bundles adds significant complexity and overhead to the scraping process. JavaScript files can be minified, obfuscated, or loaded dynamically, making it challenging to reliably extract email addresses.
Most scrapers focus on parsing the HTML DOM (directly or utilizing browser automation tools like Selenium to render the page and extract information.)
Based on this knowledge, I'm content with the current implementation.
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Assuming a normal build process and the example usage described in
README.md, the example input produces an output that specifies the email in plaintext in the.jsthat is served. In this case, usage of react-obfuscate provides no protection, because certainly a malicious web-crawler which goes to the greater difficulty of rendering the DOM to harvest emails will also scan the.jsfor emails.Describe the solution you'd like I suggest that
README.mdshould not claim that the<Obfuscate>component makes the email or link given in the example useless for spammers, and should detail the additional steps required to protect emails and links from spammers.Given that there are 12,000 downloads per month for this package, improving it to obfuscate the children and props of the
<Obfuscate>tag in the compiled source might be worth doing.Describe alternatives you've considered javascript-obfuscator can be used mangle string literals in source code appropriately, or they might be scrambled by hand and recovered with vanilla JavaScript.