Scrapy is a tool which helps in extracting data from websites. It allows scripting rules, and it works quickly. It comes with flexible design allows adding new functionality easily. It helps in various applications like data mining and processing information. This screen scraping software enables scraping data from text boxes and buttons from the programs that are executing on the system. This software enables displaying current software and allows refreshing the list. It allows saving results as a text or excel file. It can extract large amounts of text as well. I think analysing users activity on dark web forums/markets could be extremely interesting. Problem is, I have no clue about how to scrape and organize such data in order to study what users did. Is it possible to make something like this with scrapy? Is there any other tool available you can raccomend? Any suggestions about how to structure data?
It is a well-known fact that Python is one of the most popular programming languages for data mining and Web Scraping. There are tons of libraries and niche scrapers around the community, but we’d like to share the 5 most popular of them.
Most of these libraries' advantages can be received by using our API and some of these libraries can be used in stack with it.
The Top 5 Python Web Scraping Libraries in 2020#
1. Requests#
Well known library for most of the Python developers as a fundamental tool to get raw HTML data from web resources.
To install the library just execute the following PyPI command in your command prompt or Terminal:
After this you can check installation using REPL:
- Official docs URL: https://requests.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
- GitHub repository: https://github.com/psf/requests
2. LXML#
When we’re talking about the speed and parsing of the HTML we should keep in mind this great library called LXML. This is a real champion in HTML and XML parsing while Web Scraping, so the software based on LXML can be used for scraping of frequently-changing pages like gambling sites that provide odds for live events.
To install the library just execute the following PyPI command in your command prompt or Terminal:
The LXML Toolkit is a really powerful instrument and the whole functionality can’t be described in just a few words, so the following links might be very useful:
- Official docs URL: https://lxml.de/index.html#documentation
- GitHub repository: https://github.com/lxml/lxml/
3. BeautifulSoup#
Probably 80% of all the Python Web Scraping tutorials on the Internet uses the BeautifulSoup4 library as a simple tool for dealing with retrieved HTML in the most human-preferable way. Selectors, attributes, DOM-tree, and much more. The perfect choice for porting code to or from Javascript's Cheerio or jQuery.
To install this library just execute the following PyPI command in your command prompt or Terminal:
As it was mentioned before, there are a bunch of tutorials around the Internet about BeautifulSoup4 usage, so do not hesitate to Google it!
- Official docs URL: https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/
- Launchpad repository: https://code.launchpad.net/~leonardr/beautifulsoup/bs4
4. Selenium#
Selenium is the most popular Web Driver that has a lot of wrappers suitable for most programming languages. Quality Assurance engineers, automation specialists, developers, data scientists - all of them at least once used this perfect tool. For the Web Scraping it’s like a Swiss Army knife - there are no additional libraries needed because any action can be performed with a browser like a real user: page opening, button click, form filling, Captcha resolving, and much more.
To install this library just execute the following PyPI command in your command prompt or Terminal:
The code below describes how easy Web Crawling can be started with using Selenium:
As this example only illustrates 1% of the Selenium power, we’d like to offer of following useful links:
- Official docs URL: https://selenium-python.readthedocs.io/
- GitHub repository: https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium
5. Scrapy#
Scrapy is the greatest Web Scraping framework, and it was developed by a team with a lot of enterprise scraping experience. The software created on top of this library can be a crawler, scraper, and data extractor or even all this together.
To install this library just execute the following PyPI command in your command prompt or Terminal:
We definitely suggest you start with a tutorial to know more about this piece of gold: https://docs.scrapy.org/en/latest/intro/tutorial.html
As usual, the useful links are below:
- Official docs URL: https://docs.scrapy.org/en/latest/index.html
- GitHub repository: https://github.com/scrapy/scrapy
What web scraping library to use?#
So, it’s all up to you and up to the task you’re trying to resolve, but always remember to read the Privacy Policy and Terms of the site you’re scraping 😉.
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WebHarvy can easily extract Text, HTML, Images, URLs & Emails from websites, and save the extracted content in various formats.
- Incredibly easy-to-use, start scraping data within minutes
- Supports all types of websites. Handles login, form submission etc.
- Extract data from multiple pages, categories & keywords
- Built-in scheduler, Proxy/VPN support, Smart Help and more..
Easy Web Scraping
Web Scraping is easy with WebHarvy's point and click interface. There is absolutely no need to write any code or scripts to scrape data. You will be using WebHarvy's inbuilt browser to load websites and you can select the data to be extracted with mouse clicks. It is that easy ! (Video)
Intelligent pattern detection
WebHarvy automatically identifies patterns of data occurring in web pages. So if you need to scrape a list of items (name, address, email, price etc.) from a web page, you need not do any additional configuration. If data repeats, WebHarvy will scrape it automatically.
Save to file or database
You can save the data extracted from websites in a variety of formats. The current version of WebHarvy Web Scraping Software allows you to save the extracted data as an Excel, XML, CSV, JSON or TSV file. You can also export the scraped data to an SQL database. (Know More)
Crawl multiple pages
Often websites display data such as product listings or search results in multiple pages. WebHarvy can automatically crawl and extract data from multiple pages. Just point out the 'link to load the next page' and WebHarvy Web Scraper will automatically scrape data from all pages. (Know More)
Submit Keywords
Scrape data by automatically submitting a list of input keywords to search forms. Any number of input keywords can be submitted to multiple input text fields to perform search. Data from search results for all combinations of input keywords can be extracted.(Know More) (Video)
Safeguard Privacy
To scrape anonymously and to prevent the web scraping software from being blocked by web servers, you have the option to access target websites via proxy servers or VPN. Either a single proxy server address or a list of proxy server addresses may be used. (Know More)
Category Scraping
WebHarvy Web Scraper allows you to scrape data from a list of links which leads to similar pages/listings within a website. This allows you to scrape categories and subcategories within websites using a single configuration. (Know More) (Video)
Regular Expressions
WebHarvy allows you to apply Regular Expressions (RegEx) on Text or HTML source of web pages and scrape the matching portion. This powerful technique offers you more flexibility while scraping data.(Know More)(RegEx Tutorial)
JavaScript Support
Run your own JavaScript code in browser before extracting data. This can be used to interact with page elements, modify DOM or invoke JavaScript functions already implemented in target page. (Know More)
Image Extraction
Images can be downloaded or image URLs can be extracted. WebHarvy can automatically extract multiple images displayed in product details pages of eCommerce websites. (Know More)
Automate browser tasks
WebHarvy can be easily configured to perform tasks like Clicking Links, Selecting List/Drop-down Options, Input Text to a field, Scrolling page, Opening Popups etc.
Scrapy Software
Technical Assistance
Once you purchase WebHarvy you will receive free updates and free support from us for a period of 1 year from the date of purchase.(Support Form)(Contact Us)
Scrapy Web Scraping Software Reviews