The ultimate guide to web scraping for everyone

In this post, we’ll find out how to use web Scraping Tools & APIs to perform fast and effective web-scraping for single-page applications. This will help us gather and use valuable data that isn’t always available via APIs. Let’s dive in.

What is web scraping?

Web scraping may be a technique used to extract data from websites using certain tools or API. We extract data for either business purposes or for Data analysis. Here we are getting to specialize in tools that will be employed by both Developers also as Non-developers.

We perform web scraping because the target website has not exposed its API. Here are some common web Scraping scenarios:

  1. Scraping Ecommerce websites for product data.
  2. Scraping Hotel booking websites for collecting reviews, ratings & pricing of the hotel.
  3. Scraping Emails for targeting customers.
  4. Scraping financial websites for data analysis or for preparing a machine learning model.

Requirements

Getting started with web scraping is straightforward and it’s divided into two simple parts-

  1. Employing a web scraping tool to form an HTTP request for data extraction.
  2. Extract important JSON data by parsing the scraped HTML data.

For web scraping tools we are getting to use Scrapingdog. They provide 1000 FREE credits & their services are often easily used directly either from their Tool or API.

After successful registration, you’ll be redirected to a dashboard that seems like below

Now, if you’re a developer and don’t want to use this tool then just attend their API documentation and begin Scraping.

You have to stick to the URL of the website you’re scraping.

Paste the key of your account, which is out there right above this tool.

Now, you’ll either render JavaScript otherwise you can leave it because it is. Rendering JavaScript means it’ll open that website in headerless chrome and extract all the dynamic data available within that focus on the website. If you think that the target website is static then leave it because it is.

Then you’ve got a Premium proxy option which enables you to use premium proxies for websites that are harder to scrape.

Then you’ve got a geographical position proxy that helps you to urge local data of any country.

The last three options are for specifying HTML attributes & tags using which Scrapingdog provides us JSON data directly from scraped HTML data.

Make the primary Request

We are through with all the ingredients we’d like to scrape an internet site, let’s start scraping. We are scraping data from the HackerNews website that we’d like to form an HTTP request to urge the website’s content. That’s where Scrapingdog comes into action. Just paste the link inside the primary input box and your API key inside the second box.

Conclusion

In this article, we first understood web scraping and the way we will use it for automating various operations for collecting data from various websites.

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