Scrapy is a free open-source web-crawling framework written in Python. Originally designed for web scraping, it can also be used to extract data using APIs or as a general-purpose web crawler. Who should use this web scraping tool? Scrapy is for developers and tech companies with Python knowledge. Who is this for: Scraper API is a tool for developers building web scrapers, it handles.

• With web scraping, you can feed data directly into your analytics strategy, making it easy to use the most current data to base your analytics on. So after automating your data collection and collation process, you can go ahead to automate your analytics strategy too—all with web scraping.
• 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.
• Web scraping and data downloading is made easy with our tool. Furthermore, you have data security and privacy as the scraped data does not leave your browser. Instant Data Scraper USE CASES:. Lead generation for companies and freelancers. Growth hackers looking for easy ways to collect data. Recruiters looking for job candidates.

Running hobby projects is the best way to practice data science before getting your first job. And one of the best ways to get real data for a hobby project is: web scraping.

I’ve been promising this for a long time to my course participants – so here it is: my web scraping tutorial series for aspiring data scientists!

I’ll show you step by step how you can:

1. scrape a public html webpage
2. extract the data from it
3. write a script that automatically scrapes thousands of public html webpages on a website
4. create useful (and fun) analyses from the data you get
5. analyze a huge amount of text
6. analyze website metadata

This is episode #1, where we will focus on step #1 (scraping a public html webpage). And in the upcoming episodes we will continue with step #2, #3, #4, #5 and #6 (scaling this up to thousands of webpages, extracting the data from them and analyzing the data we get).

Web Scraping How To

Even more, I’ll show you the whole process in two different data languages, too, so you will see the full scope. In this article, I will start with the simpler one: bash. And in future articles, I’ll show you how to do similar things in Python, as well.

So buckle up! Web scraping tutorial episode #1 — here we go!

Before we start…

This is a hands-on tutorial. I highly recommend doing the coding part with me (and doing the exercises at the end of the articles).

I presume that you have some bash coding knowledge already — and that you have your own data server set up already. If not, please go through these tutorials first:

The project: scraping TED.com and analyze talks

When you run a data science hobby project, you should always pick a topic that you are passionate about.

As for me: I love public speaking.

I like to practice it myself and I like to listen to others… So watching TED presentations is also a hobby for me. Thus I’ll go ahead and analyze TED presentations in this tutorial.

Luckily, almost if not all TED presentations are already available online.

…
Even more, their transcripts are available, too!
…

(Thank you TED!)

So we’ll “just” have to write a bash script that collects all those transcripts for us and we can start our in-depth text analysis.

Note 1: I picked scraping TED.com just for the sake of example. If you are passionate about something else, after finishing these tutorial articles, try to find a web scraping project that resonates with you! Are you into finance? Try to scrape stock market news! Are you into real estate? Then scrape real estate websites! Are you a movie person? Your target could be imdb.com (or something similar)!

Login to your remote server!

Okay, so one more time: for this tutorial, you’ll need a remote server. If you haven’t set one up yet, now is the time! 🙂

Note: If — for some reason — you don’t like my server setup, you can use a different environment. But I strongly advise against it. Using the exact same tools that I use will guarantee that everything you read here will work on your end, too. So one last time: use this remote server setup for this tutorial.

Okay, let’s say that you have your server. Great!
Now open Terminal (or Putty) and log in with your username and IP address.

If everything’s right, you should see the command line… Something like this:

Introducing your new favorite command line tool: curl

Interestingly enough, in this whole web scraping tutorial, you will have to learn only one new bash command. And that’s curl.

curl is a great tool to access a website’s whole html code from the command line. (It’s good for many other server-to-server data transfer processes — but we won’t go there for now.)

Let’s try it out right away!

curl https://www.ted.com/

The result is:

Oh boy… What’s this mess??

It’s the full html code of TED.com — and soon enough, I’ll explain how to turn this into something more meaningful. But before that, something important.

As you can see, to get the data you want, you’ll have to use that exact URL where the website content is located — and the full version of it. So, for instance this short form won’t work:

curl ted.com

It just doesn’t return anything:

And you’ll get similar empty results for these:

curl www.ted.com

curl http://www.ted.com

Even when you define the https protocol properly but you miss the www part, you’ll get a short error message that your website content “has been moved”:

So make sure that you type the full URL and you use the one where the website is actually located. This, of course, differs from website to website. Some use the www prefix, some don’t. Some still operate under the http protocol — most (luckily) use https.

A good trick to find the URL you need is to open the website in your browser — and then simply copy-paste the full URL from there into your Terminal window:

So in TED’s case, it will be this:

curl https://www.ted.com

But, as I said, I don’t want to scrape the TED.com home page.

I want to scrape the transcripts of the talks. So let’s see how to do that!

curl in action: downloading one TED talk’s transcript

Obviously, the first step in a web scraping project is always to find the right URL for the webpage that you want to download, extract and analyze.

For now, let’s start with one single TED talk. (Then in the next episode of this tutorial, we’ll scale this up to all 3,300 talks.)

For prototyping my script, I chose the most viewed speech — which is Sir Ken Robinson’s “Do schools kill creativity.” (Excellent talk, by the way, I highly recommend watching it!)

The transcript itself is found under this URL:

So you’ll have to copy-paste this to the command line — right after the curl command:

Great!
We got our messy html code again — but this actually means that we are one step closer.

If you scroll up a bit in your Terminal window, you’ll recognize parts of the speech there:

This is not (yet) the most

And to remove all the lines after a given line in a file, this is the code:

sed -n '/[the pattern itself]/q;p'

Note: this one will remove the line with the pattern, too!

Side note:
Now, of course, if you don’t know sed inside out, you couldn’t figure out these code snippets by yourself. But here’s the thing: you don’t have to, either!

If you build up your data science knowledge by practicing, it’s okay to use Google and Stackoverflow and find answers to your questions online. Well, it’s not just okay, you have to do so!

E.g. if you don’t know how to remove lines after a given line in bash, type this into Google:

The first result brings you to Stackoverflow — where right in the first answer there are three(!) alternative solutions for the problem:

Who says learning data science by self-teaching is hard nowadays?

Okay, pep-talk is over, let’s get back to our web scraping tutorial!

Let’s replace the [the pattern itself] parts in your sed commands with the patterns we’ve found above — and then add them to your command using pipes.

Something like this:

Note 1: I used line breaks in my command… but only to make my code nicer. Using line breaks is optional in this case.

Note 2: In the Programs &amp. initiatives line, I didn’t add the * characters to the pattern in sed because the line (and the pattern) is fairly unique without them already. If you want to add them, you can. But you’ll have to know that * is a special character in sed, so to refer to it as a character in your text, you’ll have to “escape” it with a backslash first. The code would look like this: sed -n '/**** Programs &amp. initiatives ****/q;p'
Again, this won’t be needed anyway.

Let’s run the command and check the results!

Battle front 2 mac. If you scroll up, you’ll see these at the beginning of the returned text (without the annotations, of course):

Web Data Scraping Tools Free

Before you start to worry about all the chaos in the first few lines…

• The part that I annotated with the yellow frame: that’s your code. (And of course, it’s not a part of the returned results.)
• The part with the blue frame: that’s only a “status bar” that shows how fast the web scraping process was — it’s on your screen but it won’t be part of the downloaded webpage content, either. (You’ll see this clearly soon, when we save our results into a file!)

However, the one with the red frame (Details about the talk) is something that is part of the downloaded webpage content… and you won’t need it. It’s just left there, so we will remove it soon.

But first, scroll back down!

At the end of the file the situation is cleaner:

We only have one unnecessary line left there that says TED.

So you are almost there…

Removing first and last lines with the head and tail commands

And as a final step, remove the first (Details About the talk) and the last (TED) lines of the content you currently see in Terminal! These two lines are not part of the original talk… and you don’t want them in your analyses.

For this little modification, let’s use the head and tail commands (I wrote about them here).

To remove the last line, add this code: head -n-1

And to remove the first line, add this code: tail -n+2

And with that, this will be your final code:

You can try it out…

But I recommend to save this into a file first, so you will be able to reuse the data you got in the future.

If you print this freshly created proto_text.csv file to your screen, you’ll see that you have beautifully downloaded, cleaned and stored the transcript of Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk:

cat proto_text.csv

And with that you’ve finished the first episode of this web scraping tutorial!

Nice!

Exercise – your own web scraping mini-project

Now that you have seen how a simple web scraping task is done, I encourage you to try this out yourself.

Pick a simple public .html webpage from the internet — anything that interests you — and do the same steps that we have done above:

1. Download the .html site with curl!
2. Extract the text with html2text!
3. Clean the data with sed, head, tail, grep or anything else you need!

The third step could be especially challenging. There are many, many types of data cleaning issues… But hey, after all, this is what a data science hobby project is for: solving problems and challenges! So go for it, pick a webpage and scrape it! 😉 And if you get stuck, don’t be afraid to go to Google or Stackoverflow for help!

Note 1: Some big (or often-scraped) webpages block web scraping scripts. If so, you’ll get a “403 Forbidden” message returned to your curl command. Please consider it as a “polite” request from those websites and try not to find a way around to scrape their website anyway. They don’t want it — so just go ahead and find another project.

Note 2: Also consider the legal aspect of web scraping. Generally speaking, if you use your script strictly for a hobby project, this probably won’t be an issue at all. (This is not official legal advice though.) But if it becomes more serious, just in case, to stay on the safe side, consult a lawyer, too!

Web Scraping Tutorial – summary and the next steps

Scraping one webpage (or TED talk) is nice…

But boring! 😉

So in the next episode of this web scraping tutorial series, I’ll show you how to scale this up! You will write a bash script that – instead of one single talk – will scrape all 3,000+ talks on TED.com. Let’s continue here: web scraping tutorial, episode #2.

And in the later episodes, we will focus on analyzing the huge amount of text we collected. It’s going to be fun! So stay with me!

• If you want to learn more about how to become a data scientist, take my 50-minute video course: How to Become a Data Scientist. (It’s free!)
• Also check out my 6-week online course: The Junior Data Scientist’s First Month video course.

Cheers,
Tomi Mester

There are many free web scraping tools. However, not all web scraping software is for non-programmers. The lists below are the best web scraping tools without coding skills at a low cost. The freeware listed below is easy to pick up and would satisfy most scraping needs with a reasonable amount of data requirement.

Table of content

Web Scraper Client

1. Octoparse

Octoparse is a robust web scraping tool which also provides web scraping service for business owners and Enterprise. As it can be installed on both Windows and Mac OS, users can scrape data with apple devices.Web data extraction includes but not limited to social media, e-commerce, marketing, real estate listing and many others. Unlike other web scrapers that only scrape content with simple HTML structure, Octoparse can handle both static and dynamic websites with AJAX, JavaScript, cookies and etc. You can create a scraping task to extract data from a complex website such as a site that requires login and pagination. Octoparse can even deal with information that is not showing on the websites by parsing the source code. As a result, you can achieve automatic inventories tracking, price monitoring and leads generating within fingertips.

Octoparse has the Task Template Mode and Advanced Mode for users with both basic and advanced scraping skills.

• A user with basic scraping skills will take a smart move by using this brand-new feature that allows him/her to turn web pages into some structured data instantly. The Task Template Mode only takes about 6.5 seconds to pull down the data behind one page and allows you to download the data to Excel.

• The Advanced mode has more flexibility comparing the other mode. This allows users to configure and edit the workflow with more options. Advance mode is used for scraping more complex websites with a massive amount of data. With its industry-leading data fields auto-detectionfeature, Octoparse also allows you to build a crawler with ease. If you are not satisfied with the auto-generated data fields, you can always customize the scraping task to let itscrape the data for you.The cloud services enable to bulk extract huge amounts of data within a short time frame since multiple cloud servers concurrently run one task. Besides that, thecloud servicewill allow you to store and retrieve the data at any time.

Scraping Web Data Power Query

2. ParseHub

Parsehub is a great web scraper that supports collecting data from websites that use AJAX technologies, JavaScript, cookies and etc. Parsehub leverages machine learning technology which is able to read, analyze and transform web documents into relevant data.

The desktop application of Parsehub supports systems such as Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, or you can use the browser extension to achieve an instant scraping. It is not fully free, but you still can set up to five scraping tasks for free. The paid subscription plan allows you to set up at least 20 private projects. There are plenty of tutorials for at Parsehub and you can get more information from the homepage.

3. Import.io

Import.io is a SaaS web data integration software. It provides a visual environment for end-users to design and customize the workflows for harvesting data. It also allows you to capture photos and PDFs into a feasible format. Besides, it covers the entire web extraction lifecycle from data extraction to analysis within one platform. And you can easily integrate into other systems as well.

4. Outwit hub

Outwit hub is a Firefox extension, and it can be easily downloaded from the Firefox add-ons store. Once installed and activated, you can scrape the content from websites instantly. It has an outstanding 'Fast Scrape' features, which quickly scrapes data from a list of URLs that you feed in. Extracting data from sites using Outwit hub doesn’t demand programming skills. The scraping process is fairly easy to pick up. You can refer to our guide on using Outwit hub to get started with web scraping using the tool. It is a good alternative web scraping tool if you need to extract a light amount of information from the websites instantly.

Web Scraping Plugins/Extension

1. Data Scraper (Chrome)

Data Scraper can scrape data from tables and listing type data from a single web page. Its free plan should satisfy most simple scraping with a light amount of data. The paid plan has more features such as API and many anonymous IP proxies. You can fetch a large volume of data in real-time faster. You can scrape up to 500 pages per month, you need to upgrade to a paid plan.

2. Web scraper

Web scraper has a chrome extension and cloud extension. For chrome extension, you can create a sitemap (plan) on how a website should be navigated and what data should be scrapped. The cloud extension is can scrape a large volume of data and run multiple scraping tasks concurrently. You can export the data in CSV, or store the data into Couch DB.

3. Scraper (Chrome)

The scraper is another easy-to-use screen web scraper that can easily extract data from an online table, and upload the result to Google Docs.

Just select some text in a table or a list, right-click on the selected text and choose 'Scrape Similar' from the browser menu. Then you will get the data and extract other content by adding new columns using XPath or JQuery. This tool is intended for intermediate to advanced users who know how to write XPath.

Web Scraping Data Factory

Web-based Scraping Application

1. Dexi.io (formerly known as Cloud scrape)

Dexi.io is intended for advanced users who have proficient programming skills. It has three types of robots for you to create a scraping task - Extractor, Crawler, and Pipes. It provides various tools that allow you to extract the data more precisely. With its modern feature, you will able to address the details on any websites. For people with no programming skills, you may need to take a while to get used to it before creating a web scraping robot. Check out their homepage to learn more about the knowledge base.

Data Web Scraping Software

The freeware provides anonymous web proxy servers for web scraping. Extracted data will be hosted on Dexi.io’s servers for two weeks before archived, or you can directly export the extracted data to JSON or CSV files. It offers paid services to meet your needs for getting real-time data.

2. Webhose.io

Data Web Scraping Tutorial

Webhose.io enables you to get real-time data from scraping online sources from all over the world into various, clean formats. You even can scrape information on the dark web. This web scraper allows you to scrape data in many different languages using multiple filters and export scraped data in XML, JSON, and RSS formats.

The freeware offers a free subscription plan for you to make 1000 HTTP requests per month and paid subscription plans to make more HTTP requests per month to suit your web scraping needs.