Today's internet is expanding at an unimagined rate, and the data roaming about the servers worldwide are extensively diverse and can be used to gather valuable insights, but how? The answer is Web Scraping! But what exactly is web scraping, and how to achieve your goals with data extraction?
Web scraping specialists are dealing with using proxy servers to overcome various anti-bot defenses every day. One of those protections is IP rate limiting, a primary anti-scraping mechanism.
Let's learn more about this protection method and the most effective ways of bypassing it.
Using a quality proxy server is the key to a successful web scraper. A variety of IPs along with their quality make it possible to collect data from various web sites without worrying about being blocked.
Still, many websites provide free proxy lists, so can the process of getting IP addresses from them be automated? Are free proxies good enough for web scraping? Let's check it out.
Making POST, PUT, and DELETE requests is a crucial web scraping and web testing technique. Still, this functionality is not included in Puppeteer's API as a separate function.
Let's check out the workaround for this situation and create a helper function to fix this out.
The earlier article described DOM Range selection as Ctrl+A/copy-paste and claimed it could recover text from sites using display optimizations. The example performed neither keyboard input nor clipboard copying, and the general recovery claim was unsupported. This refresh compares actual text returned by five methods on a controlled fixture. Code and captured outputs.
For the readable text of an already rendered page, start with page.$eval('body', body => body.innerText). Use textContent when you explicitly want descendant text that can include hidden content and script/style source. If the HTML already contains the data, a converter such as html-to-text can work without a browser.
Those methods produce different outputs. Below, the browser sees three dynamically populated products, while the raw HTTP response contains empty product placeholders. The examples show how that difference affects text extraction, and when to keep structured records instead of flattening the page.
Working with images in NodeJS extends your web scraping capabilities, from downloading the image with an URL to retrieving photo attributes like EXIF. How to achieve the image download and obtain the data?
This article is a part of the series on image downloading with different programming languages. Check out the other articles in the series:
Replaced incomplete snippets and broad speed claims with a runnable CSS/XPath extraction example, captured JSON and explicit failure controls. The evidence packet records the tested versions and limits.
To parse HTML in C#, use an HTML parser to build a document, select the elements you need, then convert their text and attributes into validated records. AngleSharp provides CSS selectors and a DOM-style API; Html Agility Pack provides XPath selection. The right starting point is usually the selector language your application already uses.
This tutorial extracts the same product records with both libraries. It covers relative URLs, encoded text, selectors that match nothing and records with missing fields. The example parses HTML already supplied to the application; fetching a page and executing its JavaScript are separate steps.
This article will expose how to block specific resources (HTTP requests, CSS, video, images) from loading in Playwright. Playwright is Puppeteer's successor with the ability to control Chromium, Firefox, and Webkit. So I'd call it the second one of the most widely used web scraping and automation tools with headless browser support.
Java is one of the most popular and high demanded programming languages nowadays. It allows creating highly-scalable and reliable services as well as multi-threaded data extraction solutions. Let's check out the main concepts of web scraping with Java and review the most popular libraries to setup your data extraction flow.
In this article, we'll take a look at how to submit forms using Playwright. This knowledge might be beneficial while scraping the web, as it allows to get the information from the target web page, which requires providing parameters before.
Looking for a Puppeteer guide? Check out: How to submit a form with Puppeteer?