05.04.2022
1310

Web Scraping

Max Voloshin
Author at ApiX-Drive
Reading time: ~2 min

Web Scraping is the automatic extraction of data from web pages according to given parameters.

A special program scans the site and copies its data: texts, images, audio files, and so on. Then it organizes and saves them, for example, in a table in CSV format. Thus, you can upload an entire catalog of an online store, a library or any other database. Of course, if it is in the open web access.

Web Scraping is not always used for preselected resources. So, there are situations when you need to collect specific types of data, but it is not known on which sites they are located. In such cases, a search bot or crawler is used. It searches for the necessary data on the Internet, and then reports them to the scraper, a program that is directly involved in the extraction. Crawlers and scrapers are developed individually for the needs of each specific project.

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Some resources themselves provide quick access to data through an API. For example, an online store can share pictures and product characteristics from its catalog with partners in this way. If such functionality is not provided, Web Scraping comes to the rescue.

Web scraping API is a powerful tool for data extraction from websites with the ability to rotate proxies, render JavaScript, bypass CAPTCHAs, and avoid blocking with a simple API call. You don't need to create a scraping application from scratch and take care of proxies, infrastructure maintenance, scaling, etc. It is enough to request using the provided API and get the content of the needed web page. If necessary, you can optionally send in a request the proxy country and type, custom headers, cookies, and waiting time, and even execute JavaScript in the request.

In other words, web scraping API connects the data extraction software built by the service provider with the websites you need to proxy scrape.

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