Web Scraping Makes Your Work Easier!

Imagine you are at your office and all-of-a-sudden, you have been given the task to store the information from a certain website. It seems like you are going to skip your lunch break by copy-pasting data, isn’t it? Some websites can contain a very large amount of invaluable data, stock prices, product details, sports stats, etc. If you are going to access this information, you either have to use whatever format the website uses, or copy and paste the information manually into a new document. This can be tedious. There comes the concept of ‘Web Scraping’.

Web Scraping simply refers to the extraction of data from a website, which is collected and then exported into a format that is more useful to the user. For instance, you can use web scraping to export a list of product names and prices from Amazon onto an Excel spreadsheet. Although web scraping can be done manually, in most cases, software tools that run on your computer are preferred when scraping, as they can be less expensive and work at a faster rate.

Web Scraping is not a simple task. Nowadays, websites come in different interactive shapes and forms and as a result, web scrapers can vary in functionality and features, so how do web scrapers work and tackle complex sites? First a web scraper will be given one or more URLs (website link) to load before scraping, the scraper then loads the entire HTML (structure computer language) code for the page in question. Advanced scrapers will render the entire website including CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and JavaScript elements, then the scraper will either extract all the data on the page or specific data selected by the user before the project is run ideally.

The user will go through the process of selecting the specific data they want from the page. For example, you might want to scrape an Amazon product page for prices and models but are not necessarily interested in product reviews. Lastly, the web scraper will output the data that has been collected into a user-convenient format. Most web scrapers will output data to a CSV (delimited file format) or Excel spreadsheet, while more advanced scrapers will support other formats such as JSON (open standard file format) which can then be used for an API (a tool-set to create software). Web scrapers come in many types. There are already several desktop and web applications available that provide an interactive User Interface that enables the user to select the objects to scrape. One can build his own web scraper with the use of available libraries in almost every high-level language. All you need to have is knowledge of working in that programming language.