Semalt: Web Scraping Software - Top Tips

Data displayed by most web pages and websites can only be accessed using a browser. Most sites fail to offer functionalities where you can save your target-data on your machine. The only option you have to collect the data is copy-paste your target data manually, which is a cumbersome and time-consuming task.

That is why you need web scraping to complete your projects. Web scraping, also known as web harvesting, is a technique of extracting target-text using a web scraping software. A web scraping software retrieves data from web pages and websites whereby the obtained information is saved in table format or on your local machine.

Why Octoparse?

Web scraping tutorial helps starters extract information from the web and in dynamic sites. Octoparse offers tutorials on how you can use web scraping software to scrape websites and web pages. In many cases, web scraping software is either configured to work on particular sites or customized for browsers.

With Octoparse, you can extract useful data in the cloud or use a local machine. Scraping in the cloud is however advocated over local machines. Hardware crushing and custom backups are key things you should consider when scraping data.

Octoparse allows web scrapers to extract data in three modes that include:

Wizard mode

Octoparse web scraping software is offered for free on the web. You can use the software's wizard mode to scrape single web pages, URLs, and list web pages.

Advanced mode

This is the most popular mode of web scraping. Advanced method of data extraction is based on URLs, text list, variable list, and fixed list. The mode can be used to extract both single and multiple web pages.

Smart mode

With Octoparse, you get your data within a matter of seconds. If you have been checking on web scraping tutorial, you should have come across the release of Octoparse 6.2 version. Octoparse smart mode is offered free of charge on the web. The newly released version allows you to retrieve data from the Internet into structured tables.

To use Octoparse smart mode, paste the URL to the web page you want to scrape. Click the "Smart" button and watch as the page gets turned into structured tables.

Data scraped by Octoparse web scraping software is exported into:

API

To export data using Octoparse API, you must own a professional account and retrieved data from more than one task running in the cloud. All you have to do is getting an access token by feeding your username and password in the search box.

CSV file

With Octoparse, you can quickly extract data from HTML tables and export the data into Comma-separated values.

Database

Scraped data can be exported into your MySQL database or SqlServer.

Octoparse Advanced Features

This web scraping software offers free advanced features to end-users. The features include:

• Proxies
• XPath
• Regular Expression
• Automatic IP rotation
• Schedule Extraction

Octoparse is a top-ranked web scraping software that extracts data from web pages and sites. With Octoparse, you can get your data by running an extraction in the cloud or scraping sites with your local machine. Download and install Octoparse on your PC to scrape networking sites, directories, and job postings.