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Scrape Website Content With Semalt Expert. GitHub – The Best PHP-based Web Scraper

If you want to download pictures, videos, text or HTML files to your hard drive, you must use a web scraper. A PHP-based web scraper will easily connect to different servers, scrape data, and save it to your computer or mobile device easily. For example, GitHub that is known for its user-friendly interface, can be used to scrape different web documents.

Introduction to PHP:

PHP is one of the most famous programming languages. It has been designed to extract data from different websites. Rasmus Lerdorf created Personal Home Page (PHP) in 1994, and the PHP codes were embedded into HTML codes. You can combine the PHP codes with web templates, data management systems, web frameworks and HTML files. The web servers consist of well- executed PHP codes and help us scrape data from multiple web pages. However, you cannot scrape HTML texts, but can easily cope with images, videos, and audio files. PHP is also suitable for standalone graphical applications and scrapes information from them.

GitHub

GitHub allows you to crawl different web pages and downloads data automatically. It saves your time and energy. It can also transfer files from one system to another and thus makes it easy for you to extract information from dynamic websites.

1. Suitable for programmers and developers:

GitHub is the only PHP-based web scraper that is used by a large number of programmers and developers. Unlike other ordinary data extraction programs, GitHub can scrape up to 100 pages in a second and fixes all the minor errors in your web documents. Once the data is fully scraped, you can download it to your hard drive for offline uses. The data analysts always set specific goals for their web extraction tasks, and they use GitHub to accomplish their tasks. If they want to scrape data from the latest posts, they can either use GitHub or another PHP-based web scraper. They can capture page titles and descriptions and gather useful data to accomplish their tasks on the internet.

2. Easy-to-use and reliable:

GitHub is a reliable and easy-to-use web scraper. As a student, you can use this program to scrape eBooks, journals, and articles in a large number. GitHub is useful for researchers and students and helps them carry out their projects with ease. As compared to other languages, PHP is extremely easy to learn. If you are familiar with the syntax of Perl and C++, you will be able to learn PHP quickly and get benefited from its web scraper.

3. Supports all operating systems:

Amazingly, GitHub is compatible with all operating systems and web browsers. You can also use this web scraper on your mobile device and perform data scraping tasks anywhere, anytime. With GitHub, you don't need to worry about the quality of your scraped data. In fact, you can monitor its quality while the data is being scraped. GitHub provides a Preview option to let you view the web content easily.

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3 Different Web Scraping Ways From Semalt

The significance and need of extracting or scraping data from the websites have become increasingly popular with time. Often, there is a need to extract data from both basic and advanced websites. Sometimes we manually extract data, and sometimes we have to use a tool as manual data extraction doesn't give the desired and accurate results.

Whether you are concerned about the reputation of your company or brand, want to monitor the online chatters surrounding your business, need to perform research or have to keep a finger on the pulse of a particular industry or product, you always need to scrape data and turn it from unorganized form to the structured one.

Here we have to go to discuss 3 different ways to extract data from the web.

1. Build your personal crawler.

2. Use the scraping tools.

3. Use the pre-packaged data.

1. Build Your Crawler:

The first and most famous way to tackle the data extraction is to build your crawler. For this, you will have to learn some programming languages and should have a firm grip on the technicalities of the task. You will also need some scalable and agile server to store and access the data or web content. One of the primary advantages of this method is that crawlers will be customized as per your requirements, giving you complete control of the data extraction process. It means you will get what you actually want and can scrape data from as many web pages as you want without worrying about the budget.

2. Use the Data Extractors or Scraping Tools:

If you are a professional blogger, programmer or webmaster, you may not have time to build your scraping program. In such circumstances, you should use the already existing data extractors or scraping tools. Import.io, Diffbot, Mozenda, and Kapow are some of the best web data scraping tools on the internet. They come both in free and paid versions, making it easy for you to scrape data from your favorite sites instantly. The main advantage of using the tools is that they will not only extract data for you but also will organize and structure it depending on your requirements and expectations. It won't take you lots of time to set up these programs, and you will always get the accurate and reliable results. Moreover, the web scraping tools are good when we are dealing with the finite set of resources and want to monitor the quality of data throughout the scraping process. It is suitable for both students and researchers, and these tools will help them conduct online research properly.

3. Pre-Packaged Data from the Webhose.io Platform:

The Webhose.io platform provides us access to well-extracted and useful data. With the data-as-a-service (DaaS) solution, you don't need to setup or maintain your web scraping programs and will be able to get pre-crawled and structured data easily. All we need to do is filter the data using the APIs so that we get the most relevant and accurate information. As of last year, we can also access the historical web data with this method. It means if something were lost previously, we would be able to access it in the Achieve folder of Webhose.io.

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Semalt Review: Powerful Web Data Extraction Tool

Connotate is an amazing extractor software that enables its users to extract a large amount of information from web pages. It provides them with an automated web scraping platform that can help find all the data they need instantly. It combines in a unique way speed with high-quality and relevant content. Managers and web searchers who use this extraction solution program can have the following benefits.

An Effective Web Data Extraction Tool

Connotate offers a simple interface, where the users can extract all the data they need without having to spend many hours. In fact, the experts of this platform take care of everything, so the web searchers don't have to spend a lot of time gathering all the info they want, and they don't have to spend a lot of money to programmers to do the work for them. Without using this platform, users would have to do all the work manually. Extracting content can really be a difficult task in traditional ways. Connotate uses an advanced system and automated web data, in order to give its users the best web scrap solutions.

Analyzes Content

Gathering data from various websites is not an easy task. Connotate uses a strong technology and knows exactly how to unlock the real potential of web content. Its goal is to empower its users to meet their information needs. At the same time, it adds value to the content the company delivers to its users. For example, it offers them great analytics, visualization, simple dashboards and more. Users need to request a consultation by giving specific examples of the type of web information they wish to scrape.

Offers Experienced Agents

Users need to create a Connotate agent with just one click. Moreover, data extraction software can link content with data automatically. This makes all the work much simpler, as it resolves a number of entities, manage content rights and joins data across multiple sources. The expert agents at Connotate understand the challenges. They have worked with app developers, start-ups, and other business providers to overcome them.

Automates Hundreds of Web Data

Connotate's data scraping software automates your entire data supply chain, including extraction, transformation, normalization and content delivery. Our powerful scheduling capabilities allow you to schedule individual agents and groups of similar agents, giving you fine-grained control over web data extraction and delivery. Our data extraction tools let you extract based on how often a site is updated and how critical the data is while maintaining a balanced flow of content into your downstream systems.

Simplifies Researches

Connotate uses extraction tools that are easy to implement, and its users don't need to know any special coding. Also, this web extraction software the chance to scrape various product information, as well as several reviews about their competitors and pricing from many sources across the web. It can extract sites that use Ajax and JavaScript automatically.

The advanced technology that is used by Connotate helps both managers and web searchers to create data sets and content products in a quick and successful way. With this platform, customers experience strategic advantages, great data and reduced costs.

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A Tutorial From Semalt: Web Scraping In Python

I have visited KinoPoisk (Russian version of IMDB) recently and found out that over the years I managed to rate over 1000 movies. I thought that it would be interesting to research these data more detailed: have my movie tastes changed over time? During which seasons of the year do I watch more movies?

But before we analyze and build beautiful graphics, we need to get the data. Unfortunately, many services don't have public API, so you have to roll up your sleeves and parse the html pages.

This article is intended for those who always wanted to learn how to use Web Scrapping but didn't get their hands on it or didn't know where to start.

Task

Our task is to extract the data about already seen movies: the movie's title, the date and time of watching, the user's rating.

In fact, our work is going to be done in 2 stages:

Stage 1: download and save html pages

Stage 2: parse html in a format suitable for further analysis (csv, json, pandas dataframe etc.)

Instruments

There are a lot of python-libraries for sending http-requests. The most famous and very handy one is Requests.

It is also necessary to choose a library for html parsing.

BeatifulSoup, lxml

These are the two most popular libraries for parsing html and choosing one of them is just a personal preference. Moreover, these libraries are closely connected to each other: BeautifulSoup started to use lxml as an internal parser for acceleration, and in lxml, a soupparser module was added. To compare the approaches, I will parse the data with BeautifulSoup and using XPath selectors in the module lxml.html.

Downloading Data

Let's start downloading data. First of all, let's just try to get the page by url and save it to a local file.

We open the resulting file and see that it's not that simple: the site considered us robot and won't show the data.

Let's Find Out How The Site Works

The browser has no problem in getting information from the site. Let's see how exactly it sends the request. To do this we use the "Network" panel in the "Developer Tools" in the browser (I use Firebug for this), usually, the request we need is the longest one.

As we can see, the browser also sends to headers UserAgent, cookie and another number of parameters. First, we'll just try to send correct UserAgent to a header.

This time we are successful, and now we are given the necessary data. It's worth noting that sometimes the site also checks the validity of cookie, in which case sessions in Requests library will help.

Download All Rates

Now we are able to save one page with rates. But usually the user has a lot of rates, and it's necessary to iterate through all pages. The page number that interests us is easy to transfer directly to the url.

Collecting Data From Html

Now let's get directly to collecting the data from html. The easiest way to understand how the html page is structured is by using the "Inspect element" function in the browser. In this case, everything is quite simple: the entire table with rates is in the tag. Select this node:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

from lxml import html

# Beautiful Soup

soup = BeautifulSoup(text)

film_list = soup.find('div', ('class': 'profileFilmsList'))

# lxml

tree = html.fromstring(text)

film_list_lxml = tree.xpath('//div[@class = ''profileFilmList'']')[0]

Let's learn how to pull out Russian title of the movie and a link to the movie's page (also how to get the text and the value of the attribute).

If you need to extract title in English just change "nameRus" to "nameEng".

Results

We learned how to parse websites, got acquainted with libraries Requests, BeautifulSoup, and lxml, as well as received data suitable for further analysis of already seen movies on KinoPoisk.

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Semalt Advice: 7 Useful Web Scraping & Content Extraction Tools

Scraping websites and extracting content is a common data gathering task for online businesses. A large number of sites are scraped, and data is extracted on a daily basis. Some projects are carried out with comprehensive software and tools, while the others can be completed manually. The following software are not only great but also free of cost and provide a lot of facilities to their users.

1. iMacros

iMacros is an extension for web browsers and is one of the coolest software for programmers and non-programmers. It allows you to capture and replay the web activities such as testing, downloading and uploading images and text. It also makes it easy for you to import and export the data using different databases, CV and XML files and other resources. iMacros accomplishes tasks related to web testing and crawling.

2. PromptCloud

PromptCloud is widely known for its customized web scraping, web crawling and data extraction services. It is great for online businesses and startups and can extract tons of data for you in different languages and from varying platforms. It uses a wide array of technologies to get your work done properly. You can scrape information from blogs, social media sites, review websites, online forums, and travel portals.

3. WinAutomation

WinAutomation is a reliable and authentic automation tool that assists users in a variety of tasks. This software helps you submit forms, find local data, scrape websites, and save extracted data in the form of images and text. You can also paste the extracted data into your Excel sheets, handle a variety of tasks, and organize your files in a better way. WinAutomation is also useful for email parsing and desktop management tasks.

4. Visual Web Ripper

Visual Web Ripper is a visual software used for scraping websites, harvesting data, and extract useful content instantly. It is one of the most powerful tools. It collects content through search engines, product catalogs, and news outlets, giving you the best results. This tool also retrieves data from web pages, helping you download the accurate and updated information only.

5. WebHarvy

WebHarvy is a visual scraping program that automatically identifies different web patterns and collects useful data for you. It scrapes the repeated pages also, including text, images, emails, and URLs. WebHarvy lets you scrape data from websites that don't usually let their data get extracted.

6. Darcy Ripper

Darcy Ripper is the Java-based web crawler and data extractor. This is known for its user-friendly, graphical interface and can be used to download well-structured data within seconds. Darcy Ripper lets you process any URL for data and downloads files for you in a variety of formats.

7. Ubot Studio

Ubot Studio is one of the best and most awesome web scraping and content extraction programs. It comes both in free and paid versions and is web-based application. Ubot Studio allows us to build scripts and complete a variety of actions such as data mining, web testing, and content management. You can save your files in its database or download on your hard disk within a matter of minutes.

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Semalt Expert Shares A Web Extraction Tool List

Whether you have to build a website or need to fetch your RSS feeds with accurate, useful and authentic data, you can use a range of screen scraping and data extraction programs.

If you want to capture the product data from a website on a regular basis, you must opt for Mozenda. And if you need to scrape different travel portals, social media sites, and news outlets, then Uipath and Kimono are best for you.

With these 3 tools, you can automate the form filling projects and can research on the Internet.

1. Kimono

Kimono is a famous web data extraction and screen scraping application. It is ideal for who want to power up their businesses with live data, and you don't need any coding skills to get benefited from Kimono. It can save your time and fills up your website with smashing data. You just have to download and install this tool, highlight your page elements and provide some examples so that Kimono can perform its functions properly. It is a free program with different features and is suitable for enterprises and freelancers. Kimono label your data in the JSON and CSV formats and creates APIs for your web pages, getting them stored in its database for later use. It does not require any page navigation and speeds up your data extraction work.

2. Mozenda

Mozenda is a free desktop application and screen scraping program. It helps us scrape all the data from unlimited web pages. This service will treat all the web pages as the potential data source, and you don't need any programming skills to get benefited from Mozenda. It has been recommended by a large number of programmers and SEO experts. You just need to submit your web pages and let Mozenda perform its tasks. You can easily access Mozenda's API and get accurate information. It will guide us through the screen scraping process through its screenshots and can process hundreds to thousands of web pages within an hour. This program is easy to use and does not require any technical skills at all. Sometimes, Mozenda can scrape the data and process web page pages in up to 24 hours, and that's the only drawback of this tool.

3. Uipath

Uipath specializes in creating different web pages and processing lots of websites for the users. It is one of the most reliable and best screen scraping and data extraction programs. It is perfect for both coders and web developers and can easily surpass all data extraction challenges such as page navigation. It scrapes not only your web pages but also different PDF files. You just need to open this web scraping wizard and highlight the information you need to scrape. Uipath will scrape thousands of web pages within an hour, giving you the accurate and updated data in respective columns.

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How To Use Chrome Scraper In Web Scraping: Semalt Tips

A web scraper is a program used to extract data from websites. Extracted data is later saved as a Comma-separated Values (CSV) file or to an Excel spreadsheet. Retrieving accurate data from the web using manual techniques can be a tiresome task. The solution is web scraping. After installing Web Scraper on your Chrome browser, all you need is relax while the scraper extracts data for you.

For IT beginners, web data scraping, also known as content scraping aims at transforming unstructured and semi-structured data on the web into structured data. In the past few weeks, a detailed tutorial was released guiding webmasters on how to use Chrome web scraper. Scraping entails collecting data from the web and saving it for later use.

In this article, you will learn how to use scraped data other than accessing the scraped data under the "Sitemap." For starters, a tutorial on "How to use a web scraper Chrome extension to extract data from the web" will help you have a more in-depth understanding of the web scrapers. The tutorial is available on the web for free.

How to export scraped data to a CSV file

Web data extraction has never been this easy. Understanding the concept is all that matters. To get started, click on the "Sitemap (awesomegifs)" option and select "Export data as CSV." Scroll through the offered options and go for "Download now." Select your ideal to save location to get your extracted data in CSV file.

Your CSV file should comprise of a column referred to as gifs and some rows. The total number of rows is determined by the number of URLs scraped.

How to import scraped data into a MySQL table

Having attained your CSV file comprising of the data extracted from the web, creating MySQL table is a do-it-yourself task. To get started, build a new MySQL table with the name "awesomegifs." The table should have the same structure with your CSV file. In this case, only two columns will be required. One column will comprise of the Ids and the other column URLs.

Replace the path of the CSV file with your generated path and execute your SQL command. By now, you should have all scraped URLs from your CSV file into your newly created MySQL database.

Different layouts are used to build a website. With the knowledge on how to use chrome web scraper of both tutorials, you should be able to figure out and extract data from different sites. To thoroughly enjoy web scraping, you need to understand the basics of programming. In most cases, use "CTRL+U" code to identify the attributes of your targeted data on web pages.

Web data extraction tools are recommended for small-scale scraping. If you are working on gaining competitive intelligence, hiring web scraping service is recommended. Observing the legal aspects of scraping is of utmost significance. Some e-commerce websites restrict extraction of data from the sites. Use the above-discussed guides to learn on how to export scraped data to a CSV file and MySQL table.

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Semalt Expert Defines Top 6 Major Benefits Of Scrapy

Scrapy is the free and open-source data scraper. This Python-based program is suitable for developers, non-coders, data analysts, researchers, and freelancers. You can use Scrapy to extract data and organize your web pages. This tool performs its functions with specific APIs and acts as a powerful web crawler. Scrapy helps index your web pages in a better way. This framework is maintained and owned by Scrapinghub Ltd.

1. Unique bots and spiders:

Scrapy is built around self-contained bots, spiders, and crawlers. They are given particular instructions. These bots and crawlers scrape and crawl your web pages easily. They perform their functions at a fast speed and give you accurate and reliable results. Scrapy's comprehensive spiders make it easy for you to build and scale your web content. You don't need to learn any programming language, because you can use Scrapy to test your site or blog's behavior and can improve its search engine rankings.

2. Suitable for everyone:

Scrapy is the prior choice of companies like Lyst, Sayone Technologies, Parse.ly, CareerBuilder, Data.gov.uk and Sciences Po Medialab. If you are a student and want to collect data from the internet, you must use Scrapy and get your work done. This tool is also suitable for non-programmers, app developers, large-sized companies, news outlets, travel portals and private blogs. Scrapy was first launched by Insophia and Mydeco.

3. Target dynamic websites:

It is not easy to target dynamic sites and blogs with an ordinary tool. But with Scrapy, you can easily extract data from complex websites. This tool recognizes different data patterns, collects useful information and scrapes it in no time. You can use Scrapy to extract data from Expedia, TripAdvisor, and Trivago. You can also scrape ebooks, PDF files, HTML documents, hotel and airline websites with this service. Data is scraped efficiently and is downloaded to your hard drive for offline uses.

4. Two different ways to use Scrapy:

There are two different ways to extract data from the websites: the first way is to use Scrapy's APIs and the second way is to crawl the web documents manually. Scrapy will process your data as per your requirements and will get you readable and scalable information. Unlike other ordinary tools and services, Scrapy first identifies your site's API, collects information from it and scrapes it in a desirable form.

5. Use it to collect data from Amazon and eBay:

Amazon and eBay are two popular shopping websites. With an ordinary tool, it will not be possible for you to extract information from these sites. But with Scrapy, you can easily scrape pricing information, product descriptions and images. In fact, you can scrape as many pages as you want and obtain useful results for your own website. Scrapy makes it easy for us to build our e-commerce sites.

6. Save data in different formats:

One of the most distinctive features of Scrapy is that it saves data in CSV, TXT and JSON formats. You can also download it to your hard drive for offline uses or save it directly in Scrapy's database.

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Semalt Review: Web Data Scraping Tools That Can Really Help You

We know that web scraping is a complicated technique that involves targeting and extracting information from a variety of websites. Most of the businesses depend on data, and a simple web scraping tool can resolve various data-related problems providing us with more dynamic and useful content.

Tangible benefits of web scraping tools are they are easy to use and can extract accurate data within a few seconds. Some of the options are free, while the others are paid. The web scraping tools tend to vary from one another based on their features, options, and portability. Some of them require codes while the others don't require you to have programming skills.

1. ParseHub

ParseHub takes the support of cookies, redirects, JavaScript, and AJAX to crawl and scrape multiple websites. It can identify and extract information, thanks to its machine learning technology for making it possible. ParseHub is the coolest and most recommended web data scraping tool to date, generating the output files in various formats. It is ideal for Linux and Windows users and is a free web application with five crawling options.

2. Agenty

Whether you are looking to extract a large amount of data or have scheduled some web crawling projects, Agenty will perform lots of tasks for you. Using this tool, you can run different scraping jobs simultaneously and scrape a large amount of data. It provides us with the scraped data in JSON, TSV and CSV formats and uses APIs to automate the data collection in a programming language of your choice. Its free version has a limited number of options, so you can avail the paid version that comes with a money back guarantee.

3. CloudScrape

CloudScrape is yet another web data scraping tool that supports a huge collection of data and doesn't require any downloading. This browser-based app can easily set up its crawlers and extracts real-time data for you. Later on, you can save the extracted data on Google Drive and Box.net or get it exported as CSV and JSON.

4. Datahut

Datahut is a highly scalable, flexible, and enterprise-grade web data extraction tool for all your data needs. You can get the accurate information at reasonable prices and 100% money-back guarantee. You should bear in mind that there is no free version of Datahut, but its premium version is budget-friendly and suitable for startups and established companies. It aggregates data from multiple sites and collects products, content, images, and profiles for you.

5. Webhouse.io

Webhouse.io is a web application that provides direct and easy access to the structured data and uses a web crawling technology to perform a variety of functions. It has the ability to index your site and extract data from different web pages in more than 200 languages. It supports RSS, JSON, HTML and XML files.

6. Fivetran

One of the best data scraping tools is Fivetran. It is a powerful and reliable data extractor and saves your energy and time. At a given time, Fivetran can extract from 100 to 100000 web pages without any issue.

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Web Scraping: Good And Bad Bots – Semalt Explanation

Bots represent nearly 55 percent of all web traffic. It means the most of your website traffic is coming from Internet bots rather than the human beings. A bot is the software application that is responsible for running automated tasks in the digital world. The bots typically perform repetitive tasks at high speed and are mostly undesirable by human beings. They are responsible for tiny jobs that we usually take for granted, including search engine indexing, website's health monitoring, measuring its speed, powering APIs, and fetching the web content. Bots are also used to automate the security auditing and scan your sites to find vulnerabilities, remediating them instantly.

Exploring the Difference between the Good and Bad Bots:

The bots can be divided into two different categories, good bots, and bad bots. Good bots visit your sites and help search engines crawl different web pages. For example, Googlebot crawls plenty of websites in Google results and helps discover new web pages on the internet. It uses algorithms to evaluate which blogs or websites should be crawled, how often crawling should be done, and how many pages have been indexed so far. Bad bots are responsible for performing malicious tasks, including website scraping, comment spam, and DDoS attacks. They represent over 30 percent of all traffic on the Internet. The hackers execute the bad bots and perform a variety of malicious tasks. They scan millions to billions of web pages and aim to steal or scrape content illegally. They also consume the bandwidth and continuously look for plugins and software that can be used to penetrate your websites and databases.

What's the harm?

Usually, the search engines view the scraped content as the duplicate content. It is harmful to your search engine rankings and scrapes will grab your RSS feeds to access and republish your content. They earn a lot of money with this technique. Unfortunately, the search engines have not implemented any way to get rid of bad bots. It means if your content is copied and pasted regularly, your site's ranking gets damaged in a few weeks. The search engines do penalize the sites that contain duplicate content, and they cannot recognize which website first published a piece of content.

Not all web scraping is bad

We must admit that scraping is not always harmful and malicious. It is useful for websites owners when they want to propagate the data to as many individuals as possible. For instance, the government sites and travel portals provide useful data for the general public. This type of data is usually available over the APIs, and scrapers are employed to collect this data. By no means, it is harmful to your website. Even when you scrape this content, it won't damage the reputation of your online business.

Another example of authentic and legitimate scraping is aggregation sites such as hotel booking portals, concert ticket sites, and news outlets. The bots that are responsible for distributing the content of these web pages obtain data through the APIs and scrape it as per your instructions. They aim to drive traffic and extract information for webmasters and programmers.

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Semalt: 10 Most Famous Web Scraping Tools To Extract Online Data

If you want to extract data from multiple sites of your choice and have a quick research project to undertake, these web scraping tools will help extract online data without any issue. They are easier to use and come with far better options and facilities than other similar programs. These tools have been designed to extract useful information instantly, saving a lot of time and energy of the users.

Let us here tell you that some of these programs are free of cost while the others come in both premium and unpaid versions. You would have to avail the premium plan once the trial period is over:

1. Import.io:

Import.io is known for its cutting-edge and advanced technology and is a great program for web developers and professionals scrapers. It can help access data from specific web pages and exports it to the CSV files within minutes. Hundreds to thousands of websites can be scraped without writing any code line, and Import.io will build 1000 APIs for you as per your requirements.

2. Dexi.io:

Dexi.io, also called CloudScrape, will help you get accurate and organized data within a few seconds. You don't need to download this program as Dexi.io is a browser-based editor and web scraper that not only scrapes your sites but also crawls or indexes it conveniently. It collects and saves data both on Box.net and Google Drive and exports it to JSON and CSV.

3. Webhouse.io:

Webhouse.io is another browser-based web scraper and application that crawls and extracts your websites with a single API. It can extract data in more than 240 languages and supports formats like RSS, XML, and JSON.

4. Scrapinghub:

Scrapinghub is a cloud-based web scraping program and data extractor. It uses a specific, powerful proxy rotator, known as Crawlera. Its bypassing bots will help you index your site in search engines properly and will keep it free from harmful or negative bots. The premium plan will cost you around $25 per month while its free version comes with a limited number of features.

5. Visual Scraper:

Visual Scraper is a comprehensive and authoritative web data extractor that can process multiple websites and blogs for the users, and the results are fetched within a couple of seconds. You can later access your data in the form of XML, JSON, CSV, and SQL.

6. Outwit Hub:

Outwit Hub is a useful and amazing Firefox add-on that simplifies our web search due to its marvelous and unmatched data extraction features. You can automatically browse through the web pages and can get the desired data in multiple formats.

7. Scraper:

Scraper is best known for its user-friendly interface and exports your extracted data to the Google spreadsheets. It is a free program that can be used both by startups and experts. You just have to copy the data to its clipboard and let Scraper process it for you.

8. 80legs:

This is a strong and flexible web scraper and data extractor that can figure out the quality of your data based on your requirements. It works fast and fetches the desired data in five to ten seconds. It is currently being used by companies like PayPal, MailChimp, and others.

9. Spinn3r:

With Spinn3r, it's too easy to fetch the entire data from professional sites, social media networks, RSS feeds, ATOM feeds and news outlets. It gives you the desired results in the form of JSON files.

10. ParseHub:

ParseHub can scrape web pages that support AJAX, JavaScript, redirects, and cookies. It crawls multiple sites for you and has an outstanding machine learning technology to identify your documents easily. It is available free of cost and can be accessed on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.

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What Is An HTML Extractor? Semalt Presents Famous Tools To Extract Text From HTML Documents

An HTML extractor or scraper is the tool that extracts meta-tags, meta descriptions and titles of a piece of content. To get data from simple HTML documents, you just need to have basic coding skills. But for the sophisticated HTML documents, you need to use reliable content extractors or scrapers. There are different programming languages such as Java, Python, PHP, NodeJS, C++, and JS that you need to learn to extract content from both simple and complex HTML files. For your HTML-related tasks, the following tools are the best.

1. Import.io:

Import.io is one of the best content scrapers and HTML extractors on the internet. It operates in multiple languages and slices and dices your HTML document, producing data in the form of tables and lists. This program provides options for downloading your metadata in the JSON format.

2. Octoparse:

Using Octoparse, you can extract a huge amount of data from different web pages. It is one of the most efficient HTML extractors on the internet that can scrape data both in structured and unstructured forms. Octoparse grabs useful data from images, HTML files, text files, videos, and audios.

3. Uipath:

Using Uipath, you can easily automate form filling and navigation. It is an accurate, simple and amazing HTML extractor and content scraper on the internet. Uipath reads data in the forms of JS, Silverlight, and HTML, giving you the most accurate and desirable results.

4. Kimono:

Kimono works pretty fast and scraps content from newsfeeds and travel portals. It is good for programmers and developers. This HTML extractor pulls out information from hundreds of web pages within an hour. Kimono makes it easy for you to extract data in the form of images, videos, and text.

5. Screen Scraper:

Screen Scraper is one of the best scrapers that help extract data from different HTML documents easily. It can perform both difficult and easy tasks and has plenty of navigation and precise data extraction options to get benefited from. However, Screen Scraper requires a bit of programming and coding skills. Plus, this tool comes in both free and premium version and is ideal for your HTML files.

6. Scrapy:

Scrapy is the high-level content and screen scraping program that is good for your HTML documents. It is a powerful framework, used to index web pages and extract data from blogs and sites easily. Scrapy is effective for HTML documents, and you can monitor the quality of your data while it is being processed.

7. ParseHub:

ParseHub redirects queries to web crawlers in no time and uses an advanced machine learning technology to identify HTML documents and scrape useful data from them. ParseHub is compatible with Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.

8. Spam Experts:

SpamExperts tool identifies and eliminates email spam. Moreover, it processes your HTML files and is a powerful HTML extractor. Some of its best options are synchronization and configuration of any HTML file. It can be deployed locally and in the clouds. SpamExperts monitors the outgoing and incoming data, providing you the best possible results.

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Semalt: List Of Python Internet Scrapers To Consider

In the modern marketing industry, getting well-structured and clean data turn to be a tricky task. Some website owners present data in human-readable formats, while the other fail to structure data in forms that can be easily extracted.

Web scraping and crawling are essential activities you can't ignore as a webmaster or a blogger. Python is a top-ranked community that provides potential clients with web scraping tools, scraping tutorials and practical frameworks.

E-commerce websites get governed by various terms and policies. Before crawling and extracting data, read the terms carefully and always abide them. Violation of licensing and copyrights can lead to sites termination or imprisonment. Getting the right tools to parse out data for you is the first step of your scraping campaign. Here is a list of Python crawlers and internet scrapers you should put into consideration.

MechanicalSoup

MechanicalSoup is a highly-rated scraping library that is licensed and verified by MIT. MechanicalSoup was developed from Beautiful Soup, an HTML parsing library that fits webmasters and bloggers because of its simple crawling tasks. If your crawling needs do not require you to build an internet scraper, this is the tool to give a shot.

Scrapy

Scrapy is a crawling tool recommended for marketers working on the creation of their web scraping tool. This framework is actively supported by a community to help clients develop their tools efficiently. Scrapy works on extracting data from sites in formats such as CSV and JSON. Scrapy internet scraper provides webmasters with an application programming interface that assists marketers on customizing own scraping conditions.

Scrapy comprises of well-inbuilt features that execute such tasks as spoofing and handling cookies. Scrapy also controls other community projects such as Subreddit and IRC channel. More information on Scrapy is readily available on GitHub. Scrapy is licensed under a 3-clause license. Coding is not for everyone. If coding is not your thing, consider using Portia version.

Pyspider

If you are working with a website-based user interface, Pyspider is the internet scraper to consider. With Pyspider, you can track down both single and multiple web scraping activities. Pyspider is mostly recommended for marketers working on extracting vast amounts of data from large websites. Pyspider internet scraper offers premium features such as reloading failed pages, scraping sites by age, and databases back up option.

Pyspider web crawler facilitates more comfortable and faster scraping. This internet scraper supports Python 2 and 3 effectively. Currently, developers are still working on developing Pyspider's features on GitHub. Pyspider internet scraper is verified and licensed under Apache's 2 license framework.

Other Python internet scraper to consider

Lassie – Lassie is a web scraping tool that helps marketers to extract critical phrases, title, and description from sites.

Cola – This is an internet scraper that supports Python 2.

RoboBrowser – RoboBrowser is a library that supports both Python 2 and 3 versions. This internet scraper offers features like form-filling.

Identifying crawling and scraping tools to extract and parse data is of utmost importance. This is where Python internet scrapers and crawlers come in. Python internet scrapers allow marketers to scrape and store data in an appropriate database. Use the above-pin-pointed list to identify the best Python crawlers and internet scrapers for your scraping campaign.

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Semalt: What Is Content Scraping? 4 Types Of Web Content That Is Scraped On The Net

Content scraping is the duplication of website content manually or through a number of tools. Most webmasters and bloggers protect their content under copyright laws, and posting stolen information as an original one is a serious crime!

Unfortunately, web content is mostly scraped for questionable and illegal purposes such as industrial espionage, plagiarism, and data theft. However, the legitimate and authentic purposes of content scraping are data entry, content management, data migration, competitive intelligence, reputation management or business analytics.

Four different types of content that are scraped on the internet:

Some webmasters and bloggers use content from reputable websites and blogs, considering that increasing the volume of pages on their sites is good for search engine rankings. And in fact, any content is susceptible to scraping, but four main types of scraped content are mentioned below.

1. Digital publishers and directories:

Digital publishers and online directories are often targeted by programmers and developers, who aim to scrape content from these platforms for their private blogs. Yell.com is such an example. This multinational internet service provider and online directory have gained tremendous success in recent months. A lot of content on this site has been scraped, and the spammers always look for the ways to scrape more of its pages. Similarly, Manta is the famous website where over 20 million brands have registered themselves for marketing purposes. Unfortunately, most of its content has been scraped, and a large number of bots are being used for this purpose.

2. Real estate:

Several years ago, the real estate agencies were attacked by the content scraper, and the recovering cost them more than 10 million dollars.

3. Travel:

It looks like the content of almost all travel portals has been scrapped. These companies not only provide information about best destinations in the world but also provide travel services to their customers. The travel sites are an easy target of content scrapers. Some of the leading online agencies that are at risk are Kayak, TripAdvisor, Priceline, Trivago, Expedia, and Hipmunk. They have built multibillion-dollar meta-search businesses, and their content is often scraped and reused on the small-sized websites and blogs.

4. E-commerce:

It's true that content of e-commerce site cannot be scraped easily, but the websites like eBay and Amazon are still scraped for pricing and production descriptions.

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Semalt Offers To Consider The Best Free Data Scraping Software

There are different ways to get data from blogs and sites of your preference. Some of the data scraping techniques are suitable for developers and enterprises while the others are meant for non-programmers and freelancers. Web scraping is a complex technique that turns unstructured data into structured information. It is implemented only when we use reliable and authentic software and tools. The following tools interact with sites and display useful data in an organized form.

1. Beautiful Soup:

This Python library has been designed for scraping the XML and HTML files. It is easy to install Beautiful Soup if you are using Ubuntu or Debian system.

2. Import. Io:

Import.io is a free webs scraping tool that lets us scrape data from both complex and simple sites and organizes it into a dataset. It is best known for its modern and user-friendly interface.

3. Mozenda:

Mozenda is another useful and amazing web scraping program that makes it easy for us to scrape data and capture the content from multiple sites. It comes both in free and paid versions.

4. ParseHub:

ParseHub is the visual web scraping tool that helps scrape both text and images. You can use this program to obtain data from news outlets, travel portals, and online retailers.

5. Octoparse:

Octoparse is the client-side web scraping tool for Windows. It can turn the unstructured data into an organized form without any need of codes. It is good for both programmers and developers.

6. CrawlMonster:

CrawlMonster is a wonderful web scraping program that serves both as a scraper and web crawler. It is widely used by SEO experts and lets you scan sites in a better way.

7. Connotate:

Connotate is an automatic web scraping tool. You just need to request the consultation and provide some examples of how you want your data to be extracted.

8. Common Crawl:

Common Crawl provides us with useful datasets that can be used for crawling our websites. It also contains raw data, and extracted metadata for improving your site search engine rankings.

9. Crawly:

Crawly is an automatic web scraping and data extraction service that can scrape multiple sites, turning their raw data into the structured form. You can get the results in the JSON and CSV formats.

10. Content Grabber:

Content Grabber is one of the most powerful web scraping software. It allows convenient creation of stand-alone web scraping agents.

11. Diffbot:

Diffbot is both a data scraping tool and a web crawler. It turns your web pages into APIs, giving you the best possible results.

12. Dexi. Io:

Dexi.io is ideal for professionals and newcomers. This cloud web scraping program automates your data and gets you the desired results within minutes. It comes both in free and premium versions and can handle JavaScript files too.

13. Data Scraping Studio:

Data Scraping Studio harvests data from HTML, XML, PDF documents as well as multiple web pages. It is currently available for Windows users only.

14. FMiner:

FMiner is the visual diagram designer and web scraping software that lets you build projects with its macro recording option.

15. Grabby:

Grabby is an online web scraping service that can be used to scrape data from email addresses and web pages. It is a browser-based program that requires no installation to get the things done.

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Semalt: The Most Commonly Used Data Scraping Requests

The demand for online scraping is increasing day after day because a lot of companies use a vast amount of data for different purposes. Different organizations and individuals have various web scraping needs. In fact, right now, there are infinite types of data extraction needs. To illustrate the importance of information gathering, 7 the most commonly used data extraction requests are outlined right below.

1. Data Collection from PDF files

This data scraping request is for collecting certain data from PDF files and converting it to excel files. Each of the target data files has about 15 to 20 data points in about 5 to 15 pages.

2. Extracting information through search engines and online directories

This is a common data extraction need. It requires gathering data from search engines and online directories and entering it into a specified database.

3. Email Lists organization and verification

This data extraction request requires an email address, company name, phone number, state, and the city where this or that company is located. This kind of information is usually needed for the marketing purposes. The information must be verified and organized for ease of use. A complete list of companies can be scraped easily from directories, but more information can be gotten from the official website of each company.

4. Email list compilation

This task is for gathering email addresses of people who have YouTube channels. It could be used to partner with them or market certain products/services to them. It could also be used to carry out an important survey.

5. List of all property rentals in a specific location

This web extraction request is used to get the list of property rentals on a particular website. Although the target website has lists of property rentals in several locations, only the ones in a particular location are needed for this request. Since about 1400 to 1650 property rentals are listed on the website, the required ones have to be filtered and scraped out. For each rental company, the details required are property id, name, and renters' details. All the extracted data should be exported into an excel spreadsheet as specified by the requester.

6. Contact details of finance professors in the United States

This data extraction request is for searching through the websites of all the universities in the United States to fetch the email addresses and phone numbers of finance professors.

7. Database of UK motor dealers

This web scraping task is for the compilation of UK motor dealers that specialize in Audi and Nissan brands. For each of the dealers, the required details are phone number, email address, postal address, business name, and manager's name.

In conclusion, there are hundreds of web scraping requests. The ones outlined above were just randomly chosen for the purpose of illustration.

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Semalt: DIY Crawlers Or Scrapers To Get Data From Ecommerce Websites

Various techniques and methods have been developed to grab data from e-commerce websites, online stores, social media websites or other similar portals. Sometimes you can obtain data from an e-commerce site like Amazon and eBay manually, but such data can be inaccurate and unorganized. Thus, you always need to use DIY crawlers or scrapers to extract data, monitor and maintain its quality.

Tabula:

Tabula is one of the most powerful and outstanding DIY scrapers. It can scrape your PDF files and is good for e-commerce websites. You just have to highlight the data and let Tabula scrape it for you. It promises to give accurate data as per your requirements and expectations. Once installed and activated, Tabula will extract data from both Amazon and eBay without any problem.

OpenRefine:

It is not only a web crawler but also a comprehensive and useful data extraction program. This DIY tool lets you collect data in an organized and well-versed form. You don't have to worry about its quality as OpenRefine will provide you with the high-level data extraction facilities.

Scraperwiki:

Scraperwiki is a useful DIY crawler and scraper that helps extract data from all major e-commerce websites. It encourages programmers and developers to use online information and turn it into the legitimate dataset. Scraperwiki doesn't require you to learn any programming language such as Python, PHP, and Ruby.

Scrape.it:

Scrape.it is yet another amazing DIY tool that uses a simple point-and-click option to get the things done. You can easily obtain data from your favorite e-commerce sites, complex web pages, and multimedia files using Scrape.it. This program is best known for its user-friendly interface and automatically fixes the raw data for you. It is perfect for startups and enterprises that are looking to extract Amazon's data for their businesses. It lets you extract both images and text from the modern HTML5 and Web 2.0 sites which use AJAX and JavaScript.

Semantics3:

There are a large number of DIY crawlers and data scrapers on the internet, but Semantics3 is a relatively new program. If you want to obtain information of different Amazon or eBay products without compromising on quality, you must use this tool. Downloading and installing it will not take much time. Semantics3 gained popularity in just a few months, and its database is considered one of the best and most reliable. It saves images, prices, product descriptions and other information for you from the retailers like Walmart, eBay, and Amazon. Moreover, this tool does real-time lookups for the users and comes up their expectations.

Agenty:

Agenty is a cloud-hosted scraping application best for e-commerce and travel websites. It is easy to setup and can be integrated with Google Chrome. Websites like eBay and Amazon can be extracted within minutes using this comprehensive DIY program. You can get product details, stock information, and prices.