Web Scraping (Screen Scraping) Tutorial Part III

Third of a series of tutorials presenting a step-by-step guide to scrape data from web pages. Please watch the first two if you have not already. This tutorial shows you how to write some code to programmatically scrape values desired. Use this to participate in the event Search 3.0 in the Technology Fest, Shaastra, organized by IIT Madras, in the month of August 2009

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• web
• scraping
• tutorial
• iitmadras
• shaastra
• search3
• iitm
• screenscraping
• screen
• scrape
• extract
• extraction
• scraper
• webscraper

[apoc4223]

it's funny if you compare this to the amount of code you must write for scraping if using a high level scripting language like python or ruby.

[LoginRequired1]

@apoc4223 Yeah, that's true. I merely wanted to use a more globally accessible language; and yeah there are easier ways of going about it, but this seemed more robust than many of them.

[mbehlok]

Thanks alot, you have no idea how useful that was. One quick question though, the DomParser object recieves a local file as a parameter in its constructor. Can I obtain that file directly from the web, for example puting a url as a path instead of a local path. I may get the answer to my question doing some googleing, just checking if you knew at the top of your head lol. Thanks again!

[ivanschuetz]

What's the background music :) ?