webscraping.pro
The web scraping topic has been actively growing in popularity for dozens of years now. Freelance sites are overcrowded with orders connected with this contradictory data extracting process. Today we will combine two new and revolutionary directions in web development. So, let’s consider an elegant and modern way to scrape data from websites with Node.js!
Can you imagine how many scraping instruments are at our service? Though it has a long history, scraping has at last become a multi-lingual and simple approach. Unfortunately, there is a list of non-trivial tasks which can’t be resolved in a snap.
One of these tasks is scraping javascript sites, those that output data using JavaScript. Facing this task, classic scrapers (not all of them though) ignore JS-data and continue their own life-cycle. However, when this little defect becomes a big trouble, developers all over the world take measures. And they did it! Today we consider one of the most awesome tools which scrapes JS-generated data – Splash.
The Dexi.io web scraping service has remade its functionality by adding [paid plan] addons. Through addons, more features are made available to customers, e.g. more step types/pipe actions. Those features also allow the integration of scrape results to data stores and endpoints like PostgreSQL, MySQL, Amazon S3 and other.
The hierarchical data storage problem is a non-trivial task in relational database context. For example, your online shop has goods of different categories and subcategories creating tree spans for 5 levels. How should they be stored in a database?
Luckily, there are several approaches (design patterns) that will help the developer to design database structure without both odd tables and code. As a result, the site will work faster and any changes, even on database layer, won’t cause troubles. We will study these approaches below.
SQL (Structured Query Language) is a powerful language for working with relational databases, but quite a few people are in fact ignorant of the dark side of this language, which is called SQL-injection. Anyone who knows this language well enough can extract the needed data from your site by means of SQL – unless developers build defenses against SQL-injection, of course. Let’s discuss how to hack data and how to secure your web resource from these kinds of data leaks!
Almost all developers have faced a parsing data task. Needs can be different – from a product catalog to parsing stock pricing. Parsing is a very popular direction in back-end development; there are specialists creating quality parsers and scrapers. Besides, this theme is very interesting and appeals to the tastes of everyone who enjoys web. Today we review php tools used in parsing web content.
Sometimes when you are developing a project, it might be necessary to do a parsing of xls documents. To give an example: you do a synchronization between xls worksheets and a website database, and you need to convert xls data to the Mysql and want to do it completely automatically.
If you work with Windows it is simple enough – you just need to use COM objects. However, it is another thing if you work with PHP and need to make it work under the UNIX systems. Fortunately there are many classes and libraries for this purpose. One of them is the class PHPExcel. This library is completely cross-platform, so you will not have problems with portability.
Web scraping or crawling is the act of fetching data from a third party website by downloading and parsing the HTML code to extract the data you want. It can be done manually, but generally this term refers to the automated process of downloading the HTML content of a page, parsing/extracting the data, and saving it into a database for further analysis or use.
Today I was trying to find duplicate rows in db table rows, but besides finding them, I needed to get their indexes in order to address them.
Recently we executed the CaptchaSolutions.com service testing. CaptchaSolutions.com provides an automated online captcha solver API service (the name speaks for itself). It also includes solving google reCaptcha 2.0. So we decided to test it against this challenging captcha.