Scraping youtube comments has become crucial if you are working on some sentiment analysis project. The comments section will give you an overview of the public sentiment toward any election or sports results, scams, wars, etc. Comments reflect an overall feeling of a person. What according to them is right and wrong is mentioned in the comments.
Tag: Xpath
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.
Often, we need to extract some HTML elements ordered sequentially rather than in hierarhical order.
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.
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.
Find XPath using web developer tools
Often for the purpose of scraping, one needs to find certain elements’ XPath on a webpage. How can one do that with browser Web developer tools, aka Web inspector? A picture is worth of thousand words.
Simple way HTML change monitoring
I recently came across this question in the Q&A section of a forum I belong to:
Sure, if all you want to do is something as lightweight as monitoring a set of target pages for changes, then using a ready monitoring tool is probably way more than you need. You need to keep it simple. So, here’s a quick solution with Google spreadsheet.
I always love a good cheat sheet hanging on my corkboard when I’m working, and XPath is one of the fields where I often refer to it. If you’re looking for a good XPath cheat sheet you will probably find something useful in this post.
XPath in Examples
Here we’ll show how XPath works. Let’s take the following XML as a lab rat.
TEST DRIVE: Invalid HTML
Now we will start a new Scraper Test Drive stage called ‘Invalid HTML‘. How do scrapers behave with a broken html code? Basically they did well, with almost common problem of not recognizing an unmatched quotes link.