Semalt: What Is the Most Effective Way To Scrape Content From A Website?
Data scraping is the process of extracting content from websites using special applications. Although data scraping sounds like a technical term, it can be carried out easily with a handy tool or application.
These tools are used to extract the data you need from specific web pages as fast as it's possible. Your machine will perform its work faster and better because computers can recognize one another within just a few minutes no matter how large their databases are.
Have you ever needed to revamp a website without losing its content? Your best bet is to scrape all content and save it in a particular folder. Perhaps all you need is an application or software that takes the URL of a website, scrapes all the content and saves it in a pre-designated folder.
Here is the list of tools you can try to find the one that'll correspond to all your needs:
1. HTTrack
This is an offline browser utility that can pull down websites. You can configure it in a way you need to pull down a website and retain its content. It is important to note that HTTrack cannot pull down PHP since it is a server-side code. However, it can cope with images, HTML, and JavaScript.
2. Use "Save As"
You can use the "Save As" option for any website page. It will save pages with virtually all the media content. From a Firefox browser, go to Tool, then select Page Info and click Media. It will come up with a list of all the media you can download. You have to check it and select the ones you want to extract.
3. GNU Wget
You can use GNU Wget to grab the entire website in a blink of an eye. However, this tool has a minor drawback. It cannot parse CSS files. Apart from that, it can cope with any other file. It downloads files via FTP, HTTP, and HTTPS.
4. Simple HTML DOM Parser
HTML DOM Parser is another effective scraping tool that can help you scrape all the content from your website. It has some close third-party alternatives like FluentDom, QueryPath, Zend_Dom, and phpQuery, which use DOM instead of String Parsing.
5. Scrapy
This framework can be used to scrape all the content of your website. Note that content scraping is not its only function, as it can be used for automated testing, monitoring, data mining and web crawling.
6. Use the command offered below to scrape the content of your website before pulling it apart:
file_put_contents('/some/directory/scrape_content.html', file_get_contents('https://google.com'));
Conclusion
You should try each of the options enumerated above, as they all have their strong and weak points. However, if you need to scrape a large number of websites, it is better to refer to web scraping specialists, because these tools may not be able to handle with such volumes.
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