Web Scrapers, like ScrapeMate, communicate with websites through a web browser or directly using HTTP. The web scraper uses these methods to fetch Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) data from a website. HTML is extremely versatile and can display text, images, video, shapes and more. The HTML the web scraper downloads contains the data for the webpage and describes how it should appear in a web browser. Most webpages’ HTML is dedicated to formatting and organization and is not the data relevant to a user. A web scraper must parse a webpage’s HTML in order to extract only the meaningful data.
There are 3 main steps a web scraper takes to scrape web data: 1.) identify the data to scrape, 2.) scrape the data, 3.) output the data to a specified location.
Correctly identifying the data to scrape is the most important step of scraping data. Most of a webpages’ data is not relevant to a user and it is organized with the intent of neatly displaying in a web browser so properly targeting data can be tricky. Certain software requires a user to use special text selectors to describe the data they wish to target. ScrapeMate offers the user a web browser in which they can simply click on the data they wish to target and these selectors will automatically be generated.
Once the data to scrape has been identified the web scraper can begin scraping data. This might require the web scraper to cycle through multiple pages of search results or drill down into specified pages for additional data. A web scraper might also need to wait for dynamic content to load or scroll over certain elements in order for them to be full loaded in the browser. ScrapeMate offers this important functionality.
Once the data is scraped from the website it is then organized and output into a table or spreadsheet. The most popular forms of output are supported by ScrapeMate including Excel, CSV and SqlServer. If you are not performing a one off website scrape you’ll often require the functionality to intelligently update an existing table.
After the web data has been output the user is able to use it more effectively then when it was locked in the website.