What is Web Scraping, How we can do it, and useful Tools?

 What is Web Scraping?

Web scraping, also known as web harvesting or web data extraction, is a type of data scraping that is used to gather information from websites. Using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol or a web browser, web scraping software can directly access the World Wide Web.  www

Web scraping is a way to extract information from the internet in an automated fashion. The process usually involves first having a computer (a “bot” or “web crawler”) go through a website and take down all the information it sees.

Web scraping requires computers because humans do not have the speed or efficiency to carry out these tasks at scale. It would be impossible for someone to manually scrape millions of tweets or likes from an Instagram account without the help of a computer program.

 Web scrapers come in many different shapes and sizes. Some run on your desktop and will display information on your screen as it scrapes. Others run on remote servers, saving their findings to a database that you can then access through your own computer or mobile device.

 Some web scrapers are available for you to download and use on your own computer for free, while others are only available through paid services (like Diff bot).

While most web scrapers are legal to use, some companies may not want them.

Web Scraping for E-Commerce Websites

The most basic form of web scraping consists of finding and manually extracting data from websites. In some cases, however, information on web pages may not be available to view or have it in a format that cannot be easily read. This can be due to several factors:

 1) Website owner does not allow data to be viewed by unauthorized users

2) Data is only available after logging in

3) A website has been designed in such a way that it loads its content dynamically when a page is requested

 In the case of an e-commerce website, we will not need to log in to find their product catalog but we will need to write code that can parse through their website and extract the relevant information such as product name, price, etc. If this was our only task, then manual scraping would suffice but if we needed to carry out this process regularly and automatically, we would need to write programs that can parse entire websites and follow links in order to traverse all the pages of a site. Other Articles

Why Web Scraping is important nowadays?

If you want to collect data from the web, for example, for a market research study or a project, you will need to know what web scraping is and how it can help you save time and money.

Web scraping is the art of parsing through a website's HTML code (the code behind each web page) to pull out data that can be used in another format. For example, companies use it to track competitor prices and generate sales reports. Some businesses use it to extract information about their customers or their own business operations.

Web scraping is like a human manually copying and pasting content from websites. The difference is that web scraping uses a computer program to retrieve the information automatically. Unlike humans, computers are faster at retrieving this data, which allows you to complete larger projects in shorter periods of time.

 How Can We Do Web Scraping?

Before you begin scraping, it is important to understand what it is and how it works. Let’s take a look at the process of scraping step-by-step:

l   First, you need to find a good website for scraping. Make sure that you are following all the terms and conditions on the website before you begin. You can also look for your competitor’s site and try to copy their content or information. You can also test your site by performing data mining on your own website to see how much information other people may be able to gain from your site.

l   Next, you will need to get access to a tool that allows for web scraping. This could be any type of tool such as Python, JavaScript, or even Excel macros. You should make sure that the tool allows for full automation so that you do not have to manually enter in any details every time that you want to scrape new.

The process of web scraping can be broken down into several steps:

1. Retrieve the HTML code for the website you want to scrape.

2. Parse the HTML code and extract the relevant information (data).

3. Clean and format your data as necessary.

 Web scraping techniques include:

l  Screen scraping

l  Data mining

l  Web APIs

l  Data aggregation

Tools We Can Use For Web Scraping

Some of the most popular ones are:

1. Beautiful soup

2. Scrapy

3. Nokogiri

4. Selenium

5. R

6. Python

7. JavaScript

8. Scala

9. Ruby

Scrapy:

An open-source and collaborative framework for extracting the data you need from websites. In a fast, simple, yet extensible way.

Beautiful Soup:

It is a Python library for pulling data out of HTML and XML files. It works with your favorite parser to provide idiomatic ways of navigating, searching, and modifying the parse tree. It commonly saves programmers hours or days of work.

 Selenium:

Selenium is a portable software testing framework for web applications. Selenium provides a playback tool for authoring functional tests without the need to learn a test scripting language (Selenium IDE).

R:                                                                                            We can use R for web scraping by using a package called rvest.

Python:                                                                                                     We can use Python for web scraping by using Beautiful Soup and Scrapy.

We can use JavaScript to write the code and run it on the browser.

Scala :

We can use Scala for web scraping by using any of the packages available in the language.

Ruby :

We can use Ruby for scraping with gem nokogiri.

If you are looking for a person who can scrape your competitor's data for your business, you can check out my profile. Profile