Difference between revisions of "Web scraping"

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Revision as of 09:08, 2 September 2022

Web scraping is used to scrape data such as text and images from websites. In this example we will scrape data from the Gutenberg website.

The purpose of web scraping is to transform web content into usable data for other programs or analysis. In this case we transform the following website into CSV data which can be opened in Microsoft Excel or Numbers.

Alice Wonderland Gutenberg.png
Alice Wonderland Scraped.png

Step 1:

We will use a browser extension called WebScraper.io. You can install the extension for Firefox or for for Chrome.

To learn about all of the functionality in the WebScraper.io extension you can watch the intro video.

Step 2:

After installing the extension you can navigate to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on the Gutenberg website.

Step 3:

Right click anywhere on the screen and click "inspect". This will open the inspector, a tool commonly used for debugging websites.

Alice Wonderland Inspect.png

Step 4:

You should now have an extra tab called "Web Scraper Dev". Open this tab.

Open WebScraper.io extension.png

Step 5

Create a new sitemap. Call it for example "alice". The start url is the page you are currently on: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11/11-h/11-h.htm


Alice-wonderland-create-sitemap.png
Web-scrape-create-sitemap.png