Net Web Scraping Tools
8 Best Web Scraping Tools – Learn – Hevo Data
Web Scraping simply is the process of gathering information from the Internet. Through Web Scraping Tools one can download structured data from the web to be used for analysis in an automated fashion.
This article aims at providing you with in-depth knowledge about what Web Scraping is and why it’s essential, along with a comprehensive list of the 8 Best Web Scraping Tools out there in the market, keeping in mind the features offered by each of these, pricing, target audience, and shortcomings. It will help you make an informed decision regarding the Best Web Scraping Tool catering to your business.
Table of Contents
Understanding Web ScrapingUses of Web Scraping ToolsFactors to Consider when Choosing Web Scraping ToolsTop 8 Web Scraping ToolsParseHubScrapyOctoParseScraper Content GrabberCommon CrawlConclusion
Understanding Web Scraping
Web Scraping refers to the extraction of content and data from a website. This information is then extracted in a format that is more useful to the user.
Web Scraping can be done manually, but this is extremely tedious work. To speed up the process you can use Web Scraping Tools that would be automated, cost less, and work more swiftly.
How does a Web Scraper work exactly?
First, the Web Scraper is given the URLs to load up before the scraping process. The scraper then loads the complete HTML code for the desired page. The Web Scraper will then extract either all the data on the page or the specific data selected by the user before running the nally, the Web Scraper outputs all the data that has been collected into a usable format.
Uses of Web Scraping Tools
Web Scraping Tools are used for a large number of purposes like:
Data Collection for Market ntact Information Tracking from Multiple Monitoring.
Factors to Consider when Choosing Web Scraping Tools
Most of the data present on the Internet is unstructured. Therefore we need to have systems in place to extract meaningful insights from it. As someone looking to play around with data and extract some meaningful insights from it, one of the most fundamental tasks that you are required to carry out is Web Scraping. But Web Scraping can be a resource-intensive endeavor that requires you to begin with all the necessary Web Scraping Tools at your disposal. There are a couple of factors that you need to keep in mind before you decide on the right Web Scraping Tools.
Scalability: The tool you use should be scalable because your data scraping needs will only increase with time. So you need to pick a Web Scraping Tool that doesn’t slow down with the increase in data demand. Transparent Pricing Structure: The pricing structure for the opted tool should be fairly transparent. This means that hidden costs shouldn’t crop up at a later stage; instead, every explicit detail must be made clear in the pricing structure. Choose a provider that has a clear model and doesn’t beat around the bush when talking about the features being Delivery: The choice of a desirable Web Scraping Tool will also depend on the data format in which the data must be delivered. For instance, if your data needs to be delivered in JSON format, then your search should be narrowed down to the crawlers that deliver in JSON format. To be on the safe side, you must pick a provider that provides a crawler that can deliver data in a wide array of formats. Since there are occasions where you may have to deliver data in formats that you aren’t used to. Versatility ensures that you don’t fall short when it comes to data delivery. Ideally, data delivery formats should be XML, JSON, CSV, or have it delivered to FTP, Google Cloud Storage, DropBox, etc. Handling Anti-Scraping Mechanisms: There are websites on the Internet that have anti-scraping measures in place. If you are afraid you’ve hit a wall with this, these measures can be bypassed through simple modifications to the crawler. Pick a web crawler that comes in handy in overcoming these roadblocks with a robust mechanism of its stomer Support: You might run into an issue while running your Web Scraping Tool and might need assistance to solve that issue. Customer support, therefore, becomes an important factor while deciding on a good tool. This must be the priority for the Web Scraping provider. With great customer support, you don’t need to worry about if anything goes wrong. You can bid farewell to the frustration that comes from having to wait for satisfactory answers with good customer support. Test the customer support by reaching out to them before making a purchase and note the time it takes them to respond before making an informed decision. Quality Of Data: As we discussed before, most of the data present on the Internet is unstructured and needs to be cleaned and organized before it can be put to actual use. Try looking for a Web Scraping provider that provides you the required tools to help with the cleaning and organizing of data that is scraped. Since the quality of data will impact analysis further, it is imperative to keep this factor in mind.
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Top 8 Web Scraping Tools
Choosing the ideal Web Scraping Tool that perfectly meets your business requirements can be a challenging task, especially when there’s a large variety of Web Scraping Tools available in the market. To simplify your search, here is a comprehensive list of 8 Best Web Scraping Tools that you can choose from:
ParseHubScrapyOctoParseScraper Content GrabberCommon Crawl
1. ParseHub
Image Source
Target Audience
ParseHub is an incredibly powerful and elegant tool that allows you to build web scrapers without having to write a single line of code. It is therefore as simple as simply selecting the data you need. ParseHub is targeted at pretty much anyone that wishes to play around with data. This could be anyone from analysts and data scientists to journalists.
Key Features of ParseHub
Clean Text and HTML before downloading to use graphical rseHub allows you to collect and store data on servers tomatic IP raping behind logic walls ovides Desktop Clients for Windows, Mac OS, is exported in JSON or Excel extract data from tables and maps.
ParseHub Pricing
ParseHub’s pricing structure looks like this:
Everyone: It is made available to the users free of cost. Allows 200 pages per run in 40 minutes. It supports up to 5 public projects with very limited support and data retention for 14 andard($149/month): You can get 200 pages in about 10 minutes with this plan, allowing you to scrap 10, 00 pages per run. With the Standard Plan, you can support 20 private projects backed by standard support with data retention of 14 days. Along with these features you also get IP rotation, scheduling, and the ability to store images and files in DropBox or Amazon ofessional($499/month): Scraping speed is faster than the Standard Plan(scrape up to 200 pages in 2 minutes) allowing you unlimited pages per run. You can run 120 private projects with priority support and data retention for 30 days plus the features offered in the Standard Plan. Enterprise(Open To Discussion): You can get in touch with the ParseHub team to lay down a customized plan for you based on your business needs, offering unlimited pages per run and dedicated scraping speeds across all the projects you choose to undertake on top of the features offered in the Professional Plan.
Shortcomings
Troubleshooting is not easy for larger output can be very limiting at times(not being able to publish complete scraped output).
2. Scrapy
Scrapy is a Web Scraping library used by python developers to build scalable web crawlers. It is a complete web crawling framework that handles all the functionalities that make building web crawlers difficult such as proxy middleware, querying requests among many others.
Key Features of Scrapy
Open Source Tool. Extremely well Extensible. Portable ployment is simple and reliable. Middleware modules are available for the integration of useful tools.
Scrapy Pricing
It is an open-source tool that is free of cost and managed by Scrapinghub and other contributors.
In terms of JavaScript support it is time consuming to inspect and develop the crawler to simulate AJAX/PJAX requests.
3. OctoParse
OctoParse has a target audience similar to ParseHub, catering to people who want to scrape data without having to write a single line of code, while still having control over the full process with their highly intuitive user interface.
Key Features of OctoParse
Site Parser and hosted solution for users who want to run scrapers in the and click screen scraper allowing you to scrape behind login forms, fill in forms, render javascript, scroll through the infinite scroll, and many more. Anonymous Web Data Scraping to avoid being banned.
OctoParse Pricing
Free: This plan offers unlimited pages per crawl, unlimited computers, 10, 00 records per export, and 2 concurrent local runs allowing you to build up to 10 crawlers for free with community support. Standard($75/month): This plan offers unlimited data export, 100 crawlers, scheduled extractions, Average speed extraction, auto IP rotation, task Templates, API access, and email support. This plan is mainly designed for small ofessional($209/month): This plan offers 250 crawlers, Scheduled extractions, 20 concurrent cloud extractions, High-speed extraction, Auto IP rotation, Task Templates, and Advanced API. Enterprise(Open to Discussion): All the pro features with scalable concurrent processors, multi-role access, and tailored onboarding are among the few features offered in the Enterprise Plan which is completely customized for your business needs.
OctoParse also offers Crawler Service and Data Service starting at $189 and $399 respectively.
If you run the crawler with local extraction instead of running it from the cloud, it halts automatically after 4 hours, which makes the process of recovering, saving and starting over with the next set of data very cumbersome.
4. Scraper API
Scraper API is designed for designers building web scrapers. It handles browsers, proxies, and CAPTCHAs which means that raw HTML from any website can be obtained through a simple API call.
Key Features of Scraper API
Helps you render to integrate. Geolocated Rotating Speed and reliability to build scalable web scrapers. Special pools of proxies for E-commerce price scraping, search engine scraping, social media scraping, etc.
Scraper API Pricing
Scraper API offers 1000 free API calls to start. Scraper API thereafter offers several lucrative price plans to pick from.
Hobby($29/month): This plan offers 10 Concurrent requests, 250, 000 API Calls, no Geotargeting, no JS Rendering, Standard Proxies, and reliable Email artup($99/month): The Startup Plan offers 25 Concurrent Requests, 1, 000, 000 API Calls, US Geotargeting, No JS Rendering, Standard Proxies, and Email ($249/month): The Business Plan of Scraper API offers 50 Concurrent Requests, 3, 000, 000 API Calls, All Geotargeting, JS Rendering, Residential Proxies, and Priority Email Support. Enterprise Custom(Open to Discussion): The Enterprise Custom Plan offers you an assortment of features tailored to your business needs with all the features offered in the other plans.
Scraper API as a Web Scraping Tool is not deemed suitable for browsing.
5. Mozenda
Mozenda caters to enterprises looking for a cloud-based self serve Web Scraping platform. Having scraped over 7 billion pages, Mozenda boasts enterprise customers all over the world.
Key Features of Mozenda
Offers point and click interface to create Web Scraping events in no quest blocking features and job sequencer to harvest web data in customer support and in-class account llection and publishing of data to preferred BI tools or databases ovide both phone and email support to all the scalable On-premise Hosting.
Mozenda Pricing
Mozenda’s pricing plan uses something called Processing Credits that distinguishes itself from other Web Scraping Tools. Processing Credits measures how much of Mozenda’s computing resources are used in various customer activities like page navigation, premium harvesting, image or file downloads.
Project: This is aimed at small projects with pretty low capacity requirements. It is designed for 1 user and it can build 10 web crawlers and accumulate up to 20k processing credits/month. Professional: This is offered as an entry-level business package that includes faster execution, professional support, and access to pipes and Mozenda’s apps. (35k processing credits/month)Corporate: This plan is tailored for medium to large-scale data intelligence projects handling large datasets and higher capacity requirements. ( 1 million processing credits/ month)Managed Services: This plan provides enterprise-level data extraction, monitoring, and processing. It stands out from the crowd with its dedicated capacity, prioritized robot support, and This is a secure self-hosted solution and is considered ideal for hedge funds, banks, or government and healthcare organizations who need to set up high privacy measures, comply with government and HIPAA regulations and protect their intranets containing private information.
Mozenda is a little pricey compared to the other Web Scraping Tools talked about so far with their lowest plan starting from $250/month.
6.
is best recommended for platforms or services that are on the lookout for a completely developed web scraper and data supplier for content marketing, sharing, etc. The cost offered by the platform happens to be quite affordable for growing companies.
Key Features of
Content Indexing is fairly fast. A dedicated support team that is highly Integration with different to use APIs providing full control for language and source and intuitive interface design allowing you to perform all tasks in a much simpler and practical structured, machine-readable data sets in JSON and XML access to historical feeds dating as far back as 10 ovides access to a massive repository of data feeds without having to bother about paying extra advanced feature allows you to conduct granular analysis on datasets you want to feed.
Pricing
The free version provides 1000 HTTP requests per month. Paid plans offer more features like more calls, power over the extracted data, and more benefits like image analytics, Geo-location, dark web monitoring, and up to 10 years of archived historical data.
The different plans are:-
Open Web Data Feeds: This plan incorporates Enterprise-level coverage, Real-Time Monitoring, Engagement Metrics like Social Signals and Virality Score along with clean JSON/XML Data Feed: The Cyber Data Feed plan provides the user with Real-Time Monitoring, Entity and Threat Recognition, Image Analytics and Geo-location along with access to TOR, ZeroNet, I2P, Telegram, etcArchived Web Data: This plan provides you with an archive of data dating back to 10 years, Sentiment and Entity Recognition, Engagement Metrics. This is a prepaid credit account pricing model.
The option for data retention of historical data was not available for a few were unable to change the plan within the web interface on their own, which required intervention from the sales team. Setup isn’t that simplified for non-developers.
7. Content Grabber
Content Grabber is a cloud-based Web Scraping Tool that helps businesses of all sizes with data extraction.
Key Features of Content Grabber
Web data extraction is faster compared to a lot of its you to build web apps with the dedicated API allowing you to execute web data directly from your can schedule it to scrape information from the web a wide variety of formats for the extracted data like CSV, JSON, etc.
Content Grabber Pricing
Two pricing models available for users of Content Grabber:-
Buying a licenseMonthly Subscription
For each you have three subcategories:-
Server($69/month, $449/year): This model comes equipped with a Limited Content Grabber Agent Editor allowing you to edit, run and debug agents. It also provides Scripting Support, Command-Line, and an API. Professional($149/month, $995/year): This model comes equipped with a Full-Featured Content Grabber Agent Editor allowing you to edit, run and debug agents. It also provides Scripting Support, Command-Line along with self-contained agents. However, this model does not provide an emium($299/month, $2495/year): This model comes equipped with a Full-Featured Content Grabber Agent Editor allowing you to edit, run and debug agents. It also provides Scripting Support, Command-Line along with self-contained agents and provides an API as well.
Prior knowledge of HTML and HTTP crawlers for previously scraped websites not available.
8. Common Crawl
Common Crawl was developed for anyone wishing to explore and analyze data and uncover meaningful insights from it.
Key Features of Common Crawl
Open Datasets of raw web page data and text pport for non-code based usage cases. Provides resources for educators teaching data analysis.
Common Crawl Pricing
Common Crawl allows any interested person to use this tool without having to worry about fees or any other complications. It is a registered non-profit platform that relies on donations to keep its operations smoothly running.
Support for live data isn’t pport for AJAX based sites isn’t data available in Common Crawl isn’t structured and can’t be filtered.
Conclusion
This blog first gave an idea about Web Scraping in general. It then listed the essential factors to keep in mind when making an informed decision about making a Web Scraping Tool purchase followed by a sneak peek at 8 of the best Web Scraping Tools in the market considering a string of factors. The main takeaway from this blog, therefore, is that in the end, a user should pick the Web Scraping Tools that suit their needs. Extracting complex data from a diverse set of data sources can be a challenging task and this is where Hevo saves the day!
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Web Scraping with C# – ScrapingBee
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05 October, 2020
12 min read
Jennifer Marsh is a software developer and technology writer for a number of publications across several industries including cybersecurity, programming, DevOps, and IT operations.
C# is still a popular backend programming language, and you might find yourself in need of it for scraping a web page (or multiple pages). In this article, we will cover scraping with C# using an HTTP request, parsing the results, and then extracting the information that you want to save. This method is common with basic scraping, but you will sometimes come across single-page web applications built in JavaScript such as, which require a different approach. We’ll also cover scraping these pages using PuppeteerSharp, Selenium WebDriver, and Headless Chrome.
Note: This article assumes that the reader is familiar with C# syntax and HTTP request libraries. The PuppeteerSharp and Selenium WebDriver libraries are available to make integration of Headless Chrome easier for developers. Also, this project is using Core 3. 1 framework and the HTML Agility Pack for parsing raw HTML.
Part I: Static Pages
Setup
If you’re using C# as a language, you probably already use Visual Studio. This article uses a simple Core Web Application project using MVC (Model View Controller). After you create a new project, go to the NuGet Package Manager where you can add the necessary libraries used throughout this tutorial.
In NuGet, click the “Browse” tab and then type “HTML Agility Pack” to find the dependency.
Install the package, and then you’re ready to go. This package makes it easy to parse the downloaded HTML and find tags and information that you want to save.
Finally, before you get started with coding the scraper, you need the following libraries added to the codebase:
using HtmlAgilityPack;
using;
Making an HTTP Request to a Web Page in C#
Imagine that you have a scraping project where you need to scrape Wikipedia for information on famous programmers. Wikipedia has a page with a list of famous programmers with links to each profile page. You can scrape this list and add it to a CSV file (or Excel spreadsheet) to save for future review and use. This is just one simple example of what you can do with web scraping, but the general concept is to find a site that has the information you need, use C# to scrape the content, and store it for later use. In more complex projects, you can crawl pages using the links found on a top category page.
Using HTTP Libraries to Retrieve HTML
Core introduced asynchronous HTTP request libraries to the framework. These libraries are native to, so no additional libraries are needed for basic requests. Before you make the request, you need to build the URL and store it in a variable. Because we already know the page that we want to scrape, a simple URL variable can be added to the HomeController’s Index() method. The HomeController Index() method is the default call when you first open an MVC web application.
Add the following code to the Index() method in the HomeController file:
public IActionResult Index()
{
string url = “;
return View();}
Using HTTP libraries, a static asynchronous task is returned from the request, so it’s easier to put the request functionality in its own static method. Add the following method to the HomeController file:
private static async Task
HttpClient client = new HttpClient();
curityProtocol = s13;
();
var response = tStringAsync(fullUrl);
return await response;}
Let’s break down each line of code in the above CallUrl() method.
This statement creates an HttpClient variable, which is an object from the native framework.
If you get HTTPS handshake errors, it’s likely because you are not using the right cryptographic library. The above statement forces the connection to use the TLS 1. 3 library so that an HTTPS handshake can be established. Note that TLS 1. 3 is deprecated but some web servers do not have the latest 2. 0+ libraries installed. For this basic task, cryptographic strength is not important but it could be for some other scraping requests involving sensitive data.
This statement clears headers should you decide to add your own. For instance, you might scrape content using an API request that requires a Bearer authorization token. In such a scenario, you would then add a header to the request. For example:
thorization = new AuthenticationHeaderValue(“Bearer”, accessToken);
The above would pass the authorization token to the web application server to verify that you have access to the data. Next, we have the last two lines:
return await response;
These two statements retrieve the HTML content, await the response (remember this is asynchronous) and return it to the HomeController’s Index() method where it was called. The following code is what your Index() method should contain (for now):
var response = CallUrl(url);
The code to make the HTTP request is done. We still haven’t parsed it yet, but now is a good time to run the code to ensure that the Wikipedia HTML is returned instead of any errors. Make sure you set a breakpoint in the Index() method at the following line:
`return View();`
This will ensure that you can use the Visual Studio debugger UI to view the results.
You can test the above code by clicking the “Run” button in the Visual Studio menu:
Visual Studio will stop at the breakpoint, and now you can view the results.
If you click “HTML Visualizer” from the context menu, you can see a raw HTML view of the results, but you can see a quick preview by just hovering your mouse over the variable. You can see that HTML was returned, which means that an error did not occur.
Parsing the HTML
With the HTML retrieved, it’s time to parse it. HTML Agility Pack is a common tool, but you may have your own preference. Even LINQ can be used to query HTML, but for this example and for ease of use, the Agility Pack is preferred and what we will use.
Before you parse the HTML, you need to know a little bit about the structure of the page so that you know what to use as markers for your parsing to extract only what you want and not every link on the page. You can get this information using the Chrome Inspect function. In this example, the page has a table of contents links at the top that we don’t want to include in our list. You can also take note that every link is contained within an
From the above inspection, we know that we want the content within the “li” element but not the ones with the tocsection class attribute. With the Agility Pack, we can eliminate them from the list.
We will parse the document in its own method in the HomeController, so create a new method named ParseHtml() and add the following code to it:
private List
HtmlDocument htmlDoc = new HtmlDocument();
htmlDoc. LoadHtml(html);
var programmerLinks = scendants(“li”)
(node =>! tAttributeValue(“class”, “”). Contains(“tocsection”))();
List
foreach (var link in programmerLinks)
if ( > 0)
(” + tributes[0]);}
return wikiLink;}
In the above code, a generic list of strings (the links) is created from the parsed HTML with a list of links to famous programmers on the selected Wikipedia page. We use LINQ to eliminate the table of content links, so now we just have the HTML content with links to programmer profiles on Wikipedia. We use ’s native functionality in the foreach loop to parse the first anchor tag that contains the link to the programmer profile. Because Wikipedia uses relative links in the href attribute, we manually create the absolute URL to add convenience when a reader goes into the list to click each link.
Exporting Scraped Data to a File
The code above opens the Wikipedia page and parses the HTML. We now have a generic list of links from the page. Now, we need to export the links to a CSV file. We’ll make another method named WriteToCsv() to write data from the generic list to a file. The following code is the full method that writes the extracted links to a file named “” and stores it on the local disk.
private void WriteToCsv(List
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
foreach (var link in links)
endLine(link);}
(“”, String());}
The above code is all it takes to write data to a file on local storage using native framework libraries.
The full HomeController code for this scraping section is below.
using System;
using neric;
using System. Diagnostics;
using Microsoft. Extensions. Logging;
namespace ntrollers
public class HomeController: Controller
private readonly ILogger
public HomeController(ILogger
_logger = logger;}
var linkList = ParseHtml(response);
WriteToCsv(linkList);
[ResponseCache(Duration = 0, Location =, NoStore = true)]
public IActionResult Error()
return View(new ErrorViewModel { RequestId = rrent??? aceIdentifier});}
(“”, String());}}}
Part II: Scraping Dynamic JavaScript Pages
In the previous section, data was easily available to our scraper because the HTML was constructed and returned to the scraper the same way a browser would receive data. Newer JavaScript technologies such as render pages using dynamic JavaScript code. When a page uses this type of technology, a basic HTTP request won’t return HTML to parse. Instead, you need to parse data from the JavaScript rendered in the browser.
Dynamic JavaScript isn’t the only issue. Some sites detect if JavaScript is enabled or evaluate the UserAgent value sent by the browser. The UserAgent header is a value that tells the web server the type of browser being used to access pages (e. g. Chrome, FireFox, etc). If you use web scraper code, no UserAgent is sent and many web servers will return different content based on UserAgent values. Some web servers will use JavaScript to detect when a request is not from a human user.
You can overcome this issue using libraries that leverage Headless Chrome to render the page and then parse the results. We’re introducing two libraries freely available from NuGet that can be used in conjunction with Headless Chrome to parse results. PuppeteerSharp is the first solution we use that makes asynchronous calls to a web page. The other solution is Selenium WebDriver, which is a common tool used in automated testing of web applications.
Using PuppeteerSharp with Headless Chrome
For this example, we will add the asynchronous code directly into the HomeController’s Index() method. This requires a small change to the default Index() method shown in the code below.
In addition to the Index() method changes, you must also add the library reference to the top of your HomeController code. Before you can use Puppeteer, you first must install the library from NuGet and then add the following line in your using statements:
Now, it’s time to add your HTTP request and parsing code. In this example, we’ll extract all URLs (the tag) from the page. Add the following code to the HomeController to pull the page source in Headless Chrome, making it available for us to extract links (note the change in the Index() method, which replaces the same method in the previous section example):
public async Task
string fullUrl = “;
List
var options = new LaunchOptions()
Headless = true,
ExecutablePath = “C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Google\\Chrome\\Application\\”};
var browser = await unchAsync(options, null, );
var page = await wPageAsync();
await oAsync(fullUrl);
var links = @”(document. querySelectorAll(‘a’))(a =>);”;
var urls = await page. EvaluateExpressionAsync
foreach (string url in urls)
(url);}
Similar to the previous example, the links found on the page were extracted and stored in a generic list named programmerLinks. Notice that the path to is added to the options variable. If you don’t specify the executable path, Puppeteer will be unable to initialize Headless Chrome.
Using Selenium with Headless Chrome
If you don’t want to use Puppeteer, you can use Selenium WebDriver. Selenium is a common tool used in automation testing on web applications, because in addition to rendering dynamic JavaScript code, it can also be used to emulate human actions such as clicks on a link or button. To use this solution, you need to go to NuGet and install Selenium. WebDriver and (to use Headless Chrome) romeDriver. Note: Selenium also has drivers for other popular browsers such as FireFox.
Add the following library to the using statements:
using lenium;
Now, you can add the code that will open a page and extract all links from the results. The following code demonstrates how to extract links and add them to a generic list.
var options = new ChromeOptions()
BinaryLocation = “C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Google\\Chrome\\Application\\”};
dArguments(new List
var browser = new ChromeDriver(options);
vigate(). GoToUrl(fullUrl);
var links = ndElementsByTagName(“a”);
foreach (var url in links)
(tAttribute(“href”));}
Notice that the Selenium solution is not asynchronous, so if you have a large pool of links and actions to take on a page, it will freeze your program until the scraping completes. This is the main difference between the previous solution using Puppeteer and Selenium.
Conclusion
Web scraping is a powerful tool for developers who need to obtain large amounts of data from a web application. With pre-packaged dependencies, you can turn a difficult process into only a few lines of code.
One issue we didn’t cover is getting blocked either from remote rate limits or blocks put on bot detection. Your code would be considered a bot by some applications that want to limit the number of bots accessing data. Our web scraping API can overcome this limitation so that developers can focus on parsing HTML and obtaining data rather than determining remote blocks.
Create Your Own Web Scraper in C# in Just a Few Minutes!
The importance of information gathering has been known since ancient times, and people who used it to their advantage have we can do that much easier and faster by using a scraping tool, and creating your own scraper isn’t difficult, either. The ability to gather leads faster, keep an eye on both the competition and your own brand, and learn more before investing in ideas is at your you are interested in knowing more about web scraping or how to build your tool in C#, you should tag along! Well, it is legal as long as the website you wish to scrape is ok with it. You can check that by adding “/” to its URL address like so and reading the permissions, or by looking through their TOS scraping is an automated technique used by companies of all sizes to extract data for various purposes, such as price optimization or email gathering. Researchers use web scraping to collect data reports and statistics, and developers get large amounts of data for machine does it work? Well, for most web scraping tools, all you need to do is specify the URL of the website you wish to extract data from. Depending on the scraper’s abilities, it will extract that web page’s information in a structured manner, ready for you to parse and manipulate in any way you into account that some scrapers only look at the HTML content of a page to see the information of a dynamic web page. In this case, a more sophisticated web scraping tool is needed to complete the a web scraper is very useful as it can reduce the amount of time you’d normally spend on this task. Manually copying and pasting data doesn’t sound like a fun thing to do over and over again. Think about how much it would take to get vast amounts of data to train an AI! If you are interested in knowing more about why data extraction is useful, have a look! Let’s see how we can create our web scraping tool in just a few this tutorial, I will show you how a web scraper can be written in C#. I know that using a different programming language such as Python can be more advantageous for this task, but that doesn’t mean it is impossible to do it in in C# has its advantages, such as:It is object-oriented;Has better integrity and interoperability;It is a cross-platform;1. Choose the page you want to scrapeFirst things first, you need to decide what web page to scrape. In this example, I will be scraping Greece on Wikipedia and see what subjects are presented in its Table of Contents. This is an easy example, but you can scale it to other web pages as well. 2. Inspect the code of the websiteUsing the developer tools, you can inspect each element to check and see under which tag the information you need is. Simply right-click on the web page and select “inspect”, and a “Browser Inspector Box” will pop can search for the class directly in the elements section or using the inspect tool on the web page as shown, you found out that the data you need is located within the span tag which has the class toctext. What you’ll do next is extract the whole HTML of the page, parse it, and select only the data within that specific class. Let’s make some quick preparations first! 3. Prepare the workspaceYou can use whatever IDE is comfortable for you. In this example, I will use Visual Studio Code. You will also need to install you need to create your project. To do so, you obviously have to open up Visual Studio Code. Then, you will go to the extensions menu and install C# for Visual Studio need a place to write and run our code. In the menu bar, you will select File > Open File (File > Open… on macOS) and in the dialog, you will create a folder that will serve as our you created the workplace, you can create a simple “Hello World” application template by entering the following command in our projects’ terminal:dotnet new consoleYour new project should look like this:Next, you need to install these two packages:HtmlAgilityPack is an HTML parser written in C# to read/write DOM. CsvHelper is a package that’s used to read and write CSV can install them using these command lines inside your projects’ terminal:dotnet add package csvhelperdotnet add package htmlagilitypack4. Write the codeLet’s import the packages we installed a few minutes ago, and some other helpful packages for later use:using CsvHelper;using HtmlAgilityPack;using;using neric;using obalization;Outside our Main function, you will create a public class for your table of contents class Row{public string Title {get; set;}}Now, coming back to the Main function, you need to load the page you wish to scrape. As I mentioned before, we will look at what Wikipedia is writing about Greece! HtmlWeb web = new HtmlWeb();HtmlDocument doc = (“);Our next step is to parse and select the nodes containing the information you are looking for, which is located in the span tags with the class HeaderNames = lectNodes(“//span[@class=’toctext’]”);What should you do with this information now? Let’s store it in a file for later use. To do that, you first need to iterate over each node we extracted earlier and store its text into a list. CsvHelper will do the rest of the job, creating and writing the extracted information into a titles = new List
