Web scraping and API scraping are predominantly the most practical data harvesting methods. But what do these two terms mean? What is the difference and, what is their role in the data harvesting war? The following article defines each and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of each.
Dynamic languages are helpful tools for web scraping. Scripting allows users to rapidly tie together complex systems or libraries and express ideas without dealing with memory management or build systems.
JavaScript is the most popularly used dynamic language, operating on every device with a web browser, and Node.js as a JS runtime proved to be a very successful software platform. Due to design mistakes, it became hard to evolve with an existing user base, so Deno was born to resolve all the problems. Let's find out how to scrape the web and dynamic websites with Deno.
Internet extends fast and modern websites pretty often use dynamic content load mechanisms to provide the best user experience. Still, on the other hand, it becomes harder to extract data from such web pages, as it requires the execution of internal Javascript in the page context while scraping. Let's review several conventional techniques that allow data extraction from dynamic websites using Python.
Javascript (JS) becomes more popular as a programming language for web scraping. The whole domain becomes more demanded, and more technical specialists try to start data mining with a handy scripting language. Let's check out the main concepts of web scraping with Javascript and review the most popular libraries to improve data extraction flow.
In this article, we will learn how to create a simple e-commerce search API with multiple platform support: eBay and Amazon. AutoScraper and FastAPi provide the ability to create a powerful JSON API for the date. With Playwright's help, we'll extend our scraper and avoid blocking by using ScrapingAnt's web scraping API.
As you know, Puppeteer is a high-level API to control headless Chrome, and it's probably one of the most popular web scraping tools on the Internet. The only problem is that an average web developer might be overloaded by tons of possible settings for a proper web scraping setup.
I want to share 6 handy and pretty obvious tricks that should help web developers to increase web scraper success rate, improve performance and avoid bans.
Playwright is a high-level API to control and automate headless Chrome (Chromium), Firefox and Webkit. It can be considered as an extended Puppeteer, as it allows using more browser types to automate modern web apps testing and scraping. Playwright API can be used in JavaScript & TypeScript, Python, C# and, Java. In this article, we are going to show how to set up a proxy in Playwright for all the supported browsers.
Puppeteer is a high-level API to control headless Chrome. Most things that you can do manually in the browser can be done using Puppeteer, so it quickly became one of the most popular web scraping tool in Node.js and Python. Many developers use it for a single page applications (SPA) data extraction as it allows executing client-side Javascript. In this article, we are going to show how to set up a proxy in Puppeteer and how to spin up your own rotating proxy server.
Web scraping a website with the actually supported or other browsers has a real benefit in ensuring that the scraper will not be banned by the fingerprint or the behavioral pattern. Playwright already provides full support for Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit out of the box without installing the browsers manually, but since most of the users out there use Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge instead of the open-source Chromium variant, in some scenarios, it's safer to use them to emulate a more realistic browser environment.
Please, don't consider this article too serious.
While playing around machine learning, we've found pretty interesting white paper about GPT-2. Let's find out what it can generate about web scraping!