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.
has recently launched a brand new version 7.0, which has turned out to be the most revolutionary upgrade in the past two years, with not only a more user-friendly UI, but also some of the advanced features make web scraping even easier. In this post, I will walk through some of the new features/changes made available in this new version, with respect to how a beginner, even one without any coding background, can approach this web scraping tool.
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.
Octoparse is an easy and powerful visual web scraper enabling anyone, even those without much programming background, to collect and extract data from the web. Octoparse is designed in a way to help users easily deal with complex website structures, such as those with JavaScript; it can be compared to other web scraping tools such as Import.io and Mozenda.
Some may argue that extracting 3 records per minute is not fast enough for an automated scraper (see my last post on Dexi multi-threaded jobs). However, you should realize that Dexi extractor robots behave like a full-blown modern browser and fetch all the resources that crawled pages load (CSS, JS, fonts, etc.).
In terms of performance, an extractor robot might not be as fast as a pure HTTP scraping script, but its advantage is the ability to extract data from dynamic websites which require running JavaScript code in order to generate a user-facing content. It will also be harder for anti-bot mechanisms to detect and block it.
Mozenda is a cloud web scraping service (SaaS), and we’ve already reviewed it. Since our last review, Mozenda has provided more useful utility features for data extraction. Besides multi-threaded extraction & smart data aggregation, Mozenda allows users to publish extracted data to cloud storage such as Dropbox, Amazon, and Microsoft Azure. In this post we will try to explain the new Mozenda extraction and integration capabilities.
Octoparse is a new modern visual web data extraction software. It provides users a point-&-click UI to develop extraction patterns, so that scrapers can apply these patterns to structured websites. Both experienced and inexperienced users find it easy to use Octoparse to bulk extract information from websites – for most of scraping tasks no coding needed!
Data Scraping Studio (DSS) is a new free, multi-threading studio for effective data extraction. It consists of two parts: (1) the Google Chrome extension with point-&-click interface to setup a web scraping agent and (2) the Desktop app for executing scraping agents.
Recently I got notified of Kimono service finishing its work due to kimono team being joining another project. So many data hunters who were using this prominent free API service are now in search for a good alternative.