subject: Extract data from Websites easily with the Visual Web Ripper Tool [print this page] Extract data from Websites easily with the Visual Web Ripper Tool
Web scraping has traditionally been done using scripting languages such as Python or Perl. These scripting languages provide a good platform for web scraping with easy access to important web grabbing tools such as XPATH and regular expressions. However, most people without a strong IT background will find these tools very difficult to learn and even experienced web scrapers will find these tools very time consuming to use.
When using standard scripting tools for data extraction, the web scraping process is normally implemented this way:
1. The script downloads the HTML page where you want to start extracting data.
2. The script uses regular expressions and XPATH to extract data from the web page.
3. The script looks for appropriate links to other web pages, and follows these links in order to continue data extraction.
This approach works fairly well for simple static websites, but most websites have now become dynamic and web page content may be retrieved and displayed dynamically depending on actions performed on a web page. Using standard scripting to scrape web data from highly dynamic web sites is very difficult if not impossible, since the script cannot perform the required actions on a web page in order to retrieve the dynamic content.
Visual Web Ripper is a new web page scraper that can extract data from nearly all web sites without the need for scripting, so it is perfect for the novice user without an IT background. Advanced users will find web page scraping much easier with Visual Web Ripper than relying entirely on standard scripting, and they will still have direct access to the important web grabber tools such as XPATH, Regular Expressions and even scripting to fine tune their web scraping solutions.
Visual Web Ripper is especially designed to deal with highly dynamic web sites and can easily extract data from websites with AJAX and other JavaScript technologies. This web scrapping tool has some other convenient add-ons that make it easy to create a complete web scraping solution. The build-in scheduler can extract data from websites on set time intervals and thereby keep the extracted web data up-to-date. The web scraping tool can export extracted web data to many convenient data formats and databases, and a post-processor can be assigned to save the extracted web data in a custom format.
With this web page scrapper, anonymous web grabbing can be easily facilitated by providing a list of anonymous proxy servers which can be setup in order to hide one's IP address.
This web scraping tool has a Programming Interface that gives .NET programmers direct access to the web scraping engine. A programmer can integrate the web grabber into their own application and create their own custom web page scraper.
