Web Scraper Tool Chrome
Web Scraper Documentation – Open Web Scraper
Installation
Open Web Scraper
Scraping a site
Selectors
Text selector
Link selector
Sitemap xml selector
Link popup selector
Image selector
Table selector
Element attribute selector
HTML selector
Grouped selector
Element selector
Element scroll down selector
Element click selector
Pagination selector (Beta)
CSS selector
Web Scraper Cloud
Sitemap sync
Notifications
Data quality control
API
Webhooks
Scheduler
Data Export
Parser
Replace text
Regex match
Append and prepend text
Strip HTML
Remove whitespaces
Remove column
Virtual column
Convert UNIX timestamp
Web Scraper is integrated into browser Developer tools. Figure 1 shows how you
can open it on Chrome. You can also use keyboard shortcuts to open Developer
tools. After opening Developer tools open Web Scraper tab.
Shortcuts:
Windows, Linux: Ctrl+Shift+I, F12
Mac Cmd+Opt+I
Related videos
How to open Web Scraper extension for the first time
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Web Scraper – The #1 web scraping extension
More than
400, 000 users are proud of using our solutions!
Point and click
interface
Our goal is to make web data extraction as simple as possible.
Configure scraper by simply pointing and clicking on elements.
No coding required.
Extract data from dynamic
web sites
Web Scraper can extract data from sites with multiple levels of navigation. It can navigate a
website on all levels.
Categories and subcategories
Pagination
Product pages
Built for the modern web
Websites today are built on top of JavaScript frameworks that make user interface easier to use but
are less accessible to scrapers. Web Scraper solves this by:
Full JavaScript execution
Waiting for Ajax requests
Pagination handlers
Page scroll down
Modular selector system
Web Scraper allows you to build Site Maps from different types of selectors.
This system makes it possible to tailor data extraction to different site structures.
Export data in CSV, XLSX and JSON
formats
Build scrapers, scrape sites and export data in CSV format directly from your browser.
Use Web Scraper Cloud to export data in CSV, XLSX and JSON formats, access it via API, webhooks or
get it exported via Dropbox.
Diego Kremer
Simply AMAZING. Was thinking about coding myself a simple scraper for a project
and then found this super easy to use and very powerful scraper. Worked
perfectly with all the websites I tried on. Saves a lot of time. Thanks for
that!
Carlos Figueroa
Powerful tool that beats the others out there. Has a learning curve to it but
once you conquer that the sky’s the limit. Definitely a tool worth making a
donation on and supporting for continued development. Way to go for the
authoring crew behind this tool.
Jonathan H
This is fantastic! I’m saving hours, possibly days. I was trying to scrap and old
site, badly made, no proper divs or markup.
Using the WebScraper magic, it somehow “knew” the pattern after I selected 2
elements. Amazing.
Yes, it’s a learning curve and you HAVE to watch the video and read the docs.
Don’t rate it down just because you can’t be bothered to learn it. If you put
the effort in, this will save your butt one day!
Scraping websites using the Scraper extension for Chrome – School of Data
If you are using Google Chrome there is a browser extension for scraping web pages. It’s called “Scraper” and it is easy to use. It will help you scrape a website’s content and upload the results to google docs.
Walkthrough: Scraping a website with the Scraper extension
Open Google Chrome and click on Chrome Web Store
Search for “Scraper” in extensions
The first search result is the “Scraper” extension
Click the add to chrome button.
Now let’s go back to the listing of UK MPs
Open
Now mark the entry for one MP
Right click and select “scrape similar…”
A new window will appear – the scraper console
In the scraper console you will see the scraped content
Click on “Save to Google Docs…” to save the scraped content as a Google Spreadsheet.
Walkthrough: extended scraping with the Scraper extension
Note: Before beginning this recipe – you may find it useful to understand a bit about HTML. Read our HTML primer.
Easy wasn’t it? Now let’s do something a little more complicated. Let’s say we’re interested in the roles a specific actress played. The source for all kinds of data on this is the IMDB (You can also search on sites like DBpedia or Freebase for this kinds of information; however, we’ll stick to IMDB to show the principle)
Let’s say we’re interested in creating a timeline with all the movies the Italian actress Asia Argento ever starred; where do we start?
The IMDB has a quite comprehensive archive of actors. Asia Argento’s site is:
If you open the page you’ll see all the roles she ever played, together with a title and the year – let’s scrape this information
Try to scrape it like we did above
You’ll see the list comes out garbled – this is because the list here is structured quite differently.
Go to the scraper console. Notice the small box on the upper left, saying XPath?
XPath is a query language for HTML and XML.
XPath can help you find the elements in the page you’re interested in – all you need to do is find the right element and then write the xpath for it.
Now let’s assemble our table.
You’ll see that our current Xpath – the one including the whole information is “//div[3]/div[3]/div[2]/div”
Xpath is very simple it tells the computer to look at the HTML document and select
However, we’d like to have the data separated out.
To do this use the columns part of the scraper console…
Let’s find our title first – look at the title using Inspect Element
See how the title is within a tag? Let’s add the tag to our xpath.
The expression seems to work well: let’s make this our first column
In the “Columns” section, change the name of the first column to “title”
Now let’s add the XPATH for the title to it
The xpaths in the columns section are relative, that means “. /b” will select the element
add “. /b” to the xpath for the title column and click “scrape”
See how you only get titles?
Now let’s continue for year? Years are within one
Create a new column by clicking on the small plus next to your “title” column
Now create the “year” column with xpath “. /span”
Click on scrape and see how the year is added
See how easily we got information out of a less structured webpage?
Last updated on Sep 02, 2013.
Frequently Asked Questions about web scraper tool chrome
Where is Web scraper in Chrome?
Web Scraper is integrated into browser Developer tools. Figure 1 shows how you can open it on Chrome. You can also use keyboard shortcuts to open Developer tools. After opening Developer tools open Web Scraper tab.
What is Chrome Web scraper?
Web Scraper allows you to build Site Maps from different types of selectors. This system makes it possible to tailor data extraction to different site structures.
How do I scrape data in Chrome?
Scraping websites using the Scraper extension for ChromeOpen Google Chrome and click on Chrome Web Store.Search for “Scraper” in extensions.The first search result is the “Scraper” extension.Click the add to chrome button.Now let’s go back to the listing of UK MPs.More items…•Sep 2, 2013
