Semalt Expert Explains How To Extract Phone Numbers From Websites Using Octoparse

Why Octoparse?

Webmasters use data for both research and market analysis purposes. In the internet and online marketing, the way you relate to your customers means a lot. Web scraping tools allow you to scrape phone numbers from both dynamic and static websites automatically. Nowadays, companies and organizations have shifted their advertising techniques to digital, paving the way for new ideas and marketing strategies.

Octoparse allows you to scrape phone numbers, email addresses, and fax numbers from web pages and export the retrieved data into Microsoft Excel or CouchDB. Some of the web pages such as Yelp displays structured data to their potential visitors, making it easy to extract information from such sites. However, you'll need web scraping tools with pre-packed features to retrieve phone numbers and email addresses from both semi-structured and unstructured web pages.

Using XPath and Regular Expressions to scrape web pages

You can use advanced features such as regular expressions and XPath to extract information from both unstructured and semi-structured web pages. In most cases, these pre-packed advanced features are used to scrape information found in the HTML of the target web page. Luckily, there is no programming or coding knowledge required to extract information from the web.

Octoparse offers marketers and webmasters to create a customized database where they can export scraped email addresses and phone numbers. Here is an ultimate guide on how to extract phone number details from the web.

• Open your target site and find the listed companies. Copy-paste the generated URL into your clipboard.
• Use the advanced mode and drag the "Open Page" to the workflow designer.
• Click on "Go" located on the top-right corner of your built-in browser.
• Create a pagination action by clicking on "Next" button located at the bottom of your web page. This will help you scrape phone numbers from multiple web pages.
• Click on "Loop click Next Page" to create an effective pagination action.
• Select on "Extract Text" option to extract both text and phone numbers from the selected web pages.
• Check the order of each web scraping action to extract all phone numbers from a page by clicking on "Extract Data," and then "Next" button to proceed to the next data extraction step.
• Click on "Local Extraction" to scrape phone numbers, email addresses, and fax numbers from a web page. All the extracted phone numbers will pop-up on your screen. You can decide the retrieved information as a local file or export the data to Microsoft Excel.

When it comes to web scraping, you can either decide to extract useful information from the sites all by yourself or pay for extraction services. Take your web data extraction experience to the next level by using Octoparse.