Octoparse is made for success. Data quality is of the utmost importance when it comes to creating the right pricing strategies for your eCommerce business. Octoparse helps eCommerce businesses, big or small, working to remove obstacles along the data harvesting journey to get the data you need from all across the web. Octoparse is a precise tool for the web scraping purpose. Not only does it save the amount of time for downloading the exact set of data that you want, but it also intelligently exports data into a structured format such as a spreadsheet or database. Web Scraping Handbook - Octoparse. A few weeks ago, we released a manual handbook in a hope that this could be of assistance to you. We'd love to hear your thoughts on what you like about this book as well as ways we could make it better for you in the future. It would be grateful if you can take this 2 mins survey and provide us with any feedback. Octoparse is a web scraping software that helps you quickly fetch data from any website, without coding! The Octoparse team stands behind our words 'you get what you see' with Octoparse's visual scraping process. Now, with the all-new 'Auto-detect' algorithm, we are offering an ever easier way for you to extract data from any website instantly. Octoparse not only is a handy tool for non-coders to get data from websites easily, but also offers advanced service for enterprises to get specific data. It is friendly for new starters with great user support. You can find tutorials in the Help Center and community is also available for Q&A. Click to learn more web scraping tools.

Web Scraping Challenges

Web scraping has become a hot topic among people with the rising demand for big data. More and more people hunger for extracting data from multiple websites to help with their business development. However, many challenges, such as blocking mechanisms, will rise when scaling up the web scraping processes, which can hinder people from getting data. Let’s look at the challenges in detail.

Web scraping may not work because:

1. Bot access

The first thing to check is that if your target website allows for scraping before you start it. If you find it disallows for scraping via its robots.txt, you can ask the web owner for scraping permission, explaining your scraping needs and purposes. If the owner still disagrees, it’s better to find an alternative site that has similar information.

2. Complicated and changeable web page structures

Most web pages are based on HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). Web page designers can have their own standards to design the pages, so web page structures are widely divergent. When you need to scrape multiple websites, you need to build one scraper for each website.

Moreover, websites periodically update their content to improve the user experience or add new features, which often leads to structural changes on the web page. Since web scrapers are set up according to a certain design of the page, they would not work for the updated page. Sometimes even a minor change in the target website requires you to adjust the scraper.

Octoparse uses customized workflow to simulate human behaviors so that to deal with different pages. You can modify the workflow easier to adapt to the new pages.

3. IP blocking

IP blocking is a common method to stop web scrapers from accessing data of a website. It typically happens when a website detects a high number of requests from the same IP address. The website would either totally ban the IP or restrict its access to break down the scraping process.

There are many IP proxy services like Luminati, that can be integrated with automated scrapers, saving people from such blocking.

Octoparse Cloud extraction utilizes multiple IPs to scrape one website at the same time to not only make sure one IP would not request too many times but also keep the high speed.

4. CAPTCHA

CAPTCHA(Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is often used to separate humans from scraping tools by displaying images or logical problems that humans find easy to solve but scrapers don’t.

Many CAPTCHA solvers can be implemented into bots to ensure non-stopping scrapes. Although the technologies to overcome CAPTCHA can help acquire continuous data feeds, they could still slow down the scraping process a bit.

5. Honeypot traps

Honeypot is a trap the website owner puts on the page to catch scrapers. The traps can be links that are invisible to humans but visible to scrapers. Once a scraper falls into the trap, the website can use the information it receives(e.g. its IP address) to block that scraper.

Octoparse uses XPath to precisely locates items to click or to scrape, which largely reduces the chance of falling into the trap.

6. Slow/unstable load speed

Websites may respond slowly or even fail to load when receiving too many access requests. That is not a problem when humans browse the site as they just need to reload the web page and wait for the website to recover. But scraping may be broke up as the scraper does not know how to deal with such an emergency.

Octoparse allows users to set up auto-retry or retry loading when certain conditions are met to solve the issues. It can even execute customized workflow under preset situations. Adobe after effects free. download full version mac.

7. Dynamic content

Many websites apply AJAX to update dynamic web content. Examples are lazy loading images, infinite scrolling and show more info by clicking a button via AJAX calls. It is convenient for users to view more data on such kind of websites but not for scrapers.

Octoparse can easily scrape those websites with different functions like scrolling down the page or AJAX Load.

8. Login requirement

Some protected information may require you to log in first. After you submit your login credentials, your browser automatically appends the cookie value to multiple requests you make the way most sites, so the website knows you’re the same person who just logged in earlier. So when scraping websites requiring a login, be sure that cookies have been sent with the requests.

Octoparse can simply help users to log in to a website and save the cookies just like a browser does.

9. Real-time data scraping

Real-time data scraping is essential when it comes to price comparison, inventory tracking, etc. The data can change at the blink of an eye and may lead to huge capital gains for a business. The scraper needs to monitor the websites all the time and scrape data. Even so, it still has some delay as the requesting and data delivery take time. Furthermore, acquiring a large amount of data in real-time is a big challenge, too.

Octoparse scheduled Cloud extraction can scrape websites at the minimum interval of 5 minutes to achieve nearly real-time scraping.

There will certainly be more challenges in web scraping in the future but the universal principle for scraping is always the same: treat the websites nicely. Do not try to overload it. What’s more, you can always find a web scraping tool or service such as Octoparse to help you handle the scraping job.

Artículo en español: 9 Desafíos de Web Scraping que Debes Conocer
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What is Advanced Mode?

Advanced Mode is a highly flexible and powerful web scraping mode. For people who want to scrape from websites with complex structures, we strongly recommend Advanced Mode to start your data extraction project.

With Octoparse Advanced Mode, you can

· achieve data scraping on almost all kinds of web page;

· extract data like text, URL, image, and HTML;

· design a workflow to interact with webpage such as login authentication, keywords searching and opening a drop-down menu.

· customize your workflow, such as set up a wait time, modify XPath and reformat the data extracted;

If the website you are going to scrape is very simple, you can begin your first data hunting trip with Wizard Mode.

In this tutorial, we will guide you through 3 main steps of creating a task with Advanced Mode and cover the unique features of Advanced Mode.

1. Interact with webpage in the built-in browser

· Action Tips

2. Design the workflow

· Task actions in the workflow

· Workflow execution order

3. Customize the workflow

· Customize task actions

1) Create a new task in Advanced Mode

1. Click '+Task' under Advanced Mode

2. Enter the URL and Click 'Save URL' Window 7 for mac free download.

2) Design and customize the workflow

After clicking 'Save URL', you enter the task configuration interface.

The most critical part of a task is the workflow for your specific data extraction requirements. Octoparse executes every action configured in the workflow to complete your data collection.

Under Advanced Mode, the task configuration interface can be switched between two modes: the Select Mode and the Workflow Mode .

Normally, Octoparse would have you entered the Select Mode by default. You can use the on-and-off button at the upper right corner to turn on the Workflow Mode. By turning on the Workflow Mode, you would have a better picture of what you are doing with your task and avoid yourself from messing up the steps.

Now, let's start building the workflow together.

1. Interact with the web page in the built-in browser - to capture any web data with simple clicks

1.1 Action Tips

While building a new task, usually you will begin by selecting the data you want on the web page for Octoparse to scrape.

Under Advanced Mode, when you interact with the web page in the built-in browser, Octoparse responds to you by offering notices and available activities in Action Tips.

You can capture any web data with simple clicks. All you need to do is click on the desired data field to capture and select the appropriate action to perform from Action Tips.

2. Design the workflow - to tell Octoparse where and in which order to select and extract the data you want

2.1 Task actions in the workflow

Once you've clicked on any elements from the page in the built-in browser, Octoparse intelligently predicts and detects the data you might want to capture and provide you with all the available activities to choose from in Action Tips. After you select the activity you need, the corresponding task action would be automatically generated in the workflow.

There are 10 task actions to form up the workflow.

For example, once you click 'Extract the text of the selected element' from Action Tips, an Extract Data action will be added into the workflow; once select 'Click element', a Click Item will be generated in the workflow.

Besides by clicking, you can also add a task action into the workflow by dragging and dropping. Hence, you can enjoy more flexibility while designing your workflow.

2.2 Workflow execution order

For actions added in the workflow, Octoparse executes each action from the top down. And actions wrapped in Loop Item would be executed for multiple times. You can modify your workflow order by dragging one action up and down.

3. Customize the workflow - to further configure every single action in the workflow

3.1 Customize task action

Now, you've finished the workflow designing. By clicking on each step in the workflow, you can easily see how Octoparse is interacting with the website and if the target data fields can be extracted as expected.

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Under Advanced Mode, to achieve an effective data scraping, a full range of customizing options are offered to further configure extraction actions and the data extracted.

Click the action in the workflow, and then you can see all available customizing options displayed in Customize Action area.

Download showbox for macbook pro. For example, for Extract Data action, you can modify the filed name of the data extracted from 'Field1_Text' into 'Title', or delete the data extracted by clicking .

For Go To Web Page action, you can block pop-up window to avoid the ads from slowing down the extraction speed.

3) Run the task

When you confirm the configuration, click 'Start Extraction' to run your task.

You can run the task on Local Extraction or Cloud Extraction.

Web Scraping Octoparse Tutorial

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