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Uncategorized

What is Crawlera?

I came across this tool a few weeks ago, and wanted to share it with you. So far I have not tested it myself, but it is a simple concept- Safely download web pages without the fear of overloading websites or getting banned. You write a crawler script using scruping hub, and they will run through there IP proxies and take care of the technical problems of crawling.

Crawlera is now the Smart proxy manager 

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Development

Using DOMXPath for parsing page content in PHP

The DOMXPath class is a convenient and popular means to parse HTML content with XPath.
After I’ve done a simple PHP/cURL scraper using Regex some have reasonably mentioned a request for a more efficient scrape with XPath. So, instead of parsing the content with Regex, I used DOMXPath class methods.

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Development

Python LinkedIn downloader

We’ve done the Linkedin scraper that downloades the free study courses. They include text data, exercise files and 720HD videos. The code does not represent the pure Linkedin scraper, a business directory data extractor. Yet, you might grasp the main thoughts and useful techniques for your Linkedin scraper development.

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Challenge Development

Scrape with Google App Script

In this post I want to let you how I’ve managed to complete the challenge of scraping a site with Google Apps Script (GAS).

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Development Miscellaneous

Extracting sequential HTML elements with XPath and Regex

Often, we need to extract some HTML elements ordered sequentially rather than in hierarhical order.

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Review

Scraper Google Chrome extension

Scraper is a Google Chrome extension. Scraper is a handy scraping tool, perfect for capturing data from web pages and putting it into Google spreadsheets. This tool stands in line with the other scraping software, services and plugins.

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SaaS

Web Page Change Tracking

Often, you want to detect changes on some eBay offerings or get notified of the latest items of interest from craigslist in your area. Or, you want to monitor updates on a website (your competitor’s, for example) where no RSS feed is available. How would you do it, by visiting it over and over again? No, now there are handy tools for website change monitoring. We’ve evaluated some tools and would like to recommend the most useful ones that will make your monitoring job easy. Those tools nicely complement the web scraping software, service and plugins.

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About XPath

XPath is a formal language that is used to navigate through and query elements and attributes in XML documents. While this notation is being used in XSL and XQuery, it is very useful for DOM data access and extraction. XML documents and also HTML/XHTML documents are objects of DOM parsing while using XPath.

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Development

Python: submit authenticated form using cookie and session

Recently, I was challenged to do bulk submits through an authenticated form. The website required a login. While there are plenty of examples of how to use POST and GET in Python, I want to share with you how I handled the session along with a cookie and authenticity token (CSRF-like protection).

In the post, we are going to cover the crucial techniques needed in the scripting web scraping:

  • persistent session usage
  • cookie finding and storing [in session]
  • “auth token” finding, retrieving and submitting in a form
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Uncategorized

Pros and Cons of using Selenium WebDriver for Website Scraping

Since Selenium WebDriver is created for browser automation, it can be easily used for scraping data from the web. In this post we will consider some advantages and drawbacks of using WebDriver for web scraping.