Visual Web Ripper: Using External Input Data Sources

Sometimes it is necessary to use external data sources to provide parameters for the scraping process. For example, you have a database with a bunch of ASINs and you need to scrape all product information for each one of them. As far as Visual Web Ripper is concerned, an input data source can be used to provide a list of input values to a data extraction project. A data extraction project will be run once for each row of input values.

An input data source is normally used in one of these scenarios:

    To provide a list of input values for a web form
    To provide a list of start URLs
    To provide input values for Fixed Value elements
    To provide input values for scripts

Visual Web Ripper supports the following input data sources:

    SQL Server Database
    MySQL Database
    OleDB Database
    CSV File
    Script (A script can be used to provide data from almost any data source)

To see it in action you can download a sample project that uses an input CSV file with Amazon ASIN codes to generate Amazon start URLs and extract some product data. Place both the project file and the input CSV file in the default Visual Web Ripper project folder (My Documents\Visual Web Ripper\Projects).

For further information please look at the manual topic, explaining how to use an input data source to generate start URLs.


Source: http://extract-web-data.com/visual-web-ripper-using-external-input-data-sources/

Using External Input Data in Off-the-shelf Web Scrapers

There is a question I’ve wanted to shed some light upon for a long time already: “What if I need to scrape several URL’s based on data in some external database?“.

For example, recently one of our visitors asked a very good question (thanks, Ed):

    “I have a large list of amazon.com asin. I would like to scrape 10 or so fields for each asin. Is there any web scraping software available that can read each asin from a database and form the destination url to be scraped like http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/{asin} and scrape the data?”

This question impelled me to investigate this matter. I contacted several web scraper developers, and they kindly provided me with detailed answers that allowed me to bring the following summary to your attention:
Visual Web Ripper

An input data source can be used to provide a list of input values to a data extraction project. A data extraction project will be run once for each row of input values. You can find the additional information here.
Web Content Extractor

You can use the -at”filename” command line option to add new URLs from TXT or CSV file:

    WCExtractor.exe projectfile -at”filename” -s

projectfile: the file name of the project (*.wcepr) to open.
filename – the file name of the CSV or TXT file that contains URLs separated by newlines.
-s – starts the extraction process

You can find some options and examples here.
Mozenda

Since Mozenda is cloud-based, the external data needs to be loaded up into the user’s Mozenda account. That data can then be easily used as part of the data extracting process. You can construct URLs, search for strings that match your inputs, or carry through several data fields from an input collection and add data to it as part of your output. The easiest way to get input data from an external source is to use the API to populate data into a Mozenda collection (in the user’s account). You can also input data in the Mozenda web console by importing a .csv file or importing one through our agent building tool.

Once the data is loaded into the cloud, you simply initiate building a Mozenda web agent and refer to that Data list. By using the Load page action and the variable from the inputs, you can construct a URL like http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/%asin%.
Helium Scraper

Here is a video showing how to do this with Helium Scraper:


The video shows how to use the input data as URLs and as search terms. There are many other ways you could use this data, way too many to fit in a video. Also, if you know SQL, you could run a query to get the data directly from an external MS Access database like
SELECT * FROM [MyTable] IN "C:\MyDatabase.mdb"

Note that the database needs to be a “.mdb” file.
WebSundew Data Extractor
Basically this allows using input data from external data sources. This may be CSV, Excel file or a Database (MySQL, MSSQL, etc). Here you can see how to do this in the case of an external file, but you can do it with a database in a similar way (you just need to write an SQL script that returns the necessary data).
In addition to passing URLs from the external sources you can pass other input parameters as well (input fields, for example).
Screen Scraper

Screen Scraper is really designed to be interoperable with all sorts of databases. We have composed a separate article where you can find a tutorial and a sample project about scraping Amazon products based on a list of their ASINs.


Source: http://extract-web-data.com/using-external-input-data-in-off-the-shelf-web-scrapers/

A simple way to turn a website into JSON

Recently, while surfing the web I stumbled upon an simple web scraping service named Web Scrape Master. It is a kind of RESTful web service that extracts data from a specified web site and returns it to you in JSON format.
How it works

Though I don’t know what this service may be useful for, I still like its simplicity: all you need to do is to make an HTTP GET request, passing all necessary parameters in the query string:
http://webscrapemaster.com/api/?url={url}&xpath={xpath}&attr={attr}&callback={callback}

    url  - the URL of the website you want to scrape
    xpath – xpath determining the data you need to extract
    attr - attribute the name you need to get the value of (optional)
    callback - JSON callback function (optional)

For example, for the following request to our testing ground:

http://webscrapemaster.com/api/?url=http://testing-ground.extract-web-data.com/blocks&xpath=//div[@id=case1]/div[1]/span[1]/div

You will get the following response:

[{"text":"<div class='name'>Dell Latitude D610-1.73 Laptop Wireless Computer</div>","attrs":{"class":"name"}}]
Visual Web Scraper

Also, this service offers a special visual tool for building such requests. All you need to do is to enter the URL of the website and click to the element you need to scrape:
Visual Web Scraper
Conclusion

Though I understand that the developer of this service is attempting to create a simple web scraping service, it is still hard to imagine where it can be useful. The task that the service does can be easily accomplished by means of any language.

Probably if you already have software receiving JSON from the web, and you want to feed it with data from some website, then you may find this service useful. The other possible application is to hide your IP when you do web scraping. If you have other ideas, it would be great if you shared them with us.



Source: http://extract-web-data.com/a-simple-way-to-turn-a-website-into-json/

Selenium IDE and Web Scraping

Selenium is a browser automation framework that includes IDE, Remote Control server and bindings of various flavors including Java, .Net, Ruby, Python and other. In this post we touch on the basic structure of the framework and its application to  Web Scraping.
What is Selenium IDE


Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium scripts. It is implemented as a Firefox plugin, and it allows recording browsers’ interactions in order to edit them. This works well for software tests, composing and debugging. The Selenium Remote Control is a server specific for a particular environment; it causes custom scripts to be implemented for controlled browsers. Selenium deploys on Windows, Linux, and iOS. How various Selenium components are supported with major browsers read here.
What does Selenium do and Web Scraping

Basically Selenium automates browsers. This ability is no doubt to be applied to web scraping. Since browsers (and Selenium) support JavaScript, jQuery and other methods working with dynamic content why not use this mix for benefit in web scraping, rather than to try to catch Ajax events with plain code? The second reason for this kind of scrape automation is browser-fasion data access (though today this is emulated with most libraries).

Yes, Selenium works to automate browsers, but how to control Selenium from a custom script to automate a browser for web scraping? There are Selenium PHP and other language libraries (bindings) providing for scripts to call and use Selenium. It is possible to write Selenium clients (using the libraries) in almost any language we prefer, for example Perl, Python, Java, PHP etc. Those libraries (API), along with a server, the Java written server that invokes browsers for actions, constitute the Selenum RC (Remote Control). Remote Control automatically loads the Selenium Core into the browser to control it. For more details in Selenium components refer to here.



A tough scrape task for programmer

“…cURL is good, but it is very basic.  I need to handle everything manually; I am creating HTTP requests by hand.
This gets difficult – I need to do a lot of work to make sure that the requests that I send are exactly the same as the requests that a browser would
send, both for my sake and for the website’s sake. (For my sake
because I want to get the right data, and for the website’s sake
because I don’t want to cause error messages or other problems on their site because I sent a bad request that messed with their web application).  And if there is any important javascript, I need to imitate it with PHP.
It would be a great benefit to me to be able to control a browser like Firefox with my code. It would solve all my problems regarding the emulation of a real browser…
it seems that Selenium will allow me to do this…” -Ryan S

Yes, that’s what we will consider below.
Scrape with Selenium

In order to create scripts that interact with the Selenium Server (Selenium RC, Selenium Remote Webdriver) or create local Selenium WebDriver script, there is the need to make use of language-specific client drivers (also called Formatters, they are included in the selenium-ide-1.10.0.xpi package). The Selenium servers, drivers and bindings are available at Selenium download page.
The basic recipe for scrape with Selenium:

    Use Chrome or Firefox browsers
    Get Firebug or Chrome Dev Tools (Cntl+Shift+I) in action.
    Install requirements (Remote control or WebDriver, libraries and other)
    Selenium IDE : Record a ‘test’ run thru a site, adding some assertions.
    Export as a Python (other language) script.
    Edit it (loops, data extraction, db input/output)
    Run script for the Remote Control

The short intro Slides for the scraping of tough websites with Python & Selenium are here (as Google Docs slides) and here (Slide Share).
Selenium components for Firefox installation guide

For how to install the Selenium IDE to Firefox see  here starting at slide 21. The Selenium Core and Remote Control installation instructions are there too.
Extracting for dynamic content using jQuery/JavaScript with Selenium

One programmer is doing a similar thing …

1. launch a selenium RC (remote control) server
2. load a page
3. inject the jQuery script
4. select the interested contents using jQuery/JavaScript
5. send back to the PHP client using JSON.

He particularly finds it quite easy and convenient to use jQuery for
screen scraping, rather than using PHP/XPath.
Conclusion

The Selenium IDE is the popular tool for browser automation, mostly for its software testing application, yet also in that Web Scraping techniques for tough dynamic websites may be implemented with IDE along with the Selenium Remote Control server. These are the basic steps for it:

    Record the ‘test‘ browser behavior in IDE and export it as the custom programming language script
    Formatted language script runs on the Remote Control server that forces browser to send HTTP requests and then script catches the Ajax powered responses to extract content.

Selenium based Web Scraping is an easy task for small scale projects, but it consumes a lot of memory resources, since for each request it will launch a new browser instance.



Source: http://extract-web-data.com/selenium-ide-and-web-scraping/

Why Data Entry Outsourcing?

Data entry is the core of any business and though it may appear to be easy to manage and handle, this involves many processes that need to be dealt systematically. Huge changes have taken place in the field of data entry and due to this, handling work has become much easier then before. So if you want to make use of the best data entry services to maintain the data and other information about your company, then you need to have a professional company which provides data entry services with lowest possible rates and also within deadline.

Nowadays, it's becoming trend to outsource your Work to reliable service provider who provides excellent output out of their work. Many Companies or Organization prefer to outsource their data entry work to an offshore location. One of the key reasons why it has become so popular is the fact that the services they are providing from highly qualified professionals is cost effective and time bound.

Following are benefits of data entry outsourcing

o It helps you to focus on core business

o It reduces capital cost of infrastructure

o Competitive pricing which are as low as 40-60% of the prevailing US cost

o Remove management headaches

o Improves employee satisfaction with higher value addition jobs

o Use latest standard and new technology

o Quick turn around time and strong quality

o Make best use of competitive resources available worldwide

o High speed and low cost communication

o Line data processing possible from any location

Boost up your business by outsourcing data entry work.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Why-Data-Entry-Outsourcing?&id=1350362

Data Entry Outsourcing

Data entry outsourcing is contracting with outside consultants, software houses or service bureaus to perform systems analysis, programming, and data center operations. In the U.S. in 2003, the term took on extra meaning, often referring to jobs being given to people in companies located in India and other countries. The main reason behind outsourcing is the availability of qualified and experienced computer operators at low cost.

Data entry outsourcing is limited to all types of data entry operations e.g. data conversion, document and image processing, catalog processing services, image enhancement, image editing and photo manipulation services, etc.

The need for data entry is constant for some organizations for making day to day decisions. In such cases data entry is a regular and continuous requirement. The types of companies for which this is the case are financial institutions, hospitals, lawyers, court houses, oil companies, transportation companies, Ivy League colleges, pharmaceutical companies, universities, publishing companies etc. For some other organizations data entry may be just a temporary requirement. Accurate and easily accessible data is a necessity for all.

Accumulated data is a powerful management resource. Since data entry outsourcing at lower cost is available, the latent potential of the information accumulated in data which was dumped earlier is being usefully exploited by the organization where data entry is just a temporary requirement.

The combination of digitization of media and the rush to outsource has resulted in a wide range of customers from the UK, USA, France, Norway and more than 20 other countries coming to India, China etc for data entry outsourcing.

Most of the time-consuming data entry jobs are being done by outsourcing. For example, catalog management, which involves handling and maintaining paper catalogs, is not just time consuming, but also expensive. By converting your product catalogs to online and digital catalogs, making changes, and updating your product catalog becomes as easy as the click of a button once data entry has been completed.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Entry-Outsourcing&id=222083

Advantages of Online Data Entry Services

People all over the world are enthusiastic to buy online data entry services as they find it cost effective. Most of them have an impression that they get quality services against the prices they have to pay. Entering data online is of a great help to business units of all sizes as they consider them as their main basis of profession.

Online data entering and typing services providers have skilled resources at their service who deliver quality work timely. These service providers have modernized technology, assuring cent percent security of data. Online data entry services include the following:

    Data entry
    Data Processing
    Product entry
    Data typing
    Data mining, Data capture/collection
    Business Process Outsourcing
    Data Conversion
    Form Filling
    Web and mortgage research
    Extraction services
    Online copying, pasting, editing, sorting, as well as indexing data
    E-books and e-magazines data entry

Get companies world wide quality services to business units of all sizes, some of the common input formats are:

    PDF
    TIFF
    GIF
    XBM
    JPG
    PNG
    BMP
    TGA
    XML
    HTML
    SGML
    Printed documents
    Hard copies, etc

Benefits of outsourcing online data entering services:

Major benefits of data entry for business units is that they get the facts and figures which helps in taking strategic decisions for the organization. The data projected by numbers turns to be a factor of evaluation that accelerates the progress of the business. Online data typing services maintain high level of security by using systems that are highly protected.

The business organization progresses because of right decisions taken with the help of superior quality data available.

    Save operational overhead expense.
    Saves time and space.
    Accurate services can be accessed.
    Eliminating the paper documents.
    Cost effective.
    Data accessible from anywhere in the world.
    100% work satisfaction.
    Access to professional and experienced data typing services.
    Adequate knowledge of wide range industrial needs.
    Use of highly advance technologies for quality results.

Business organizations find themselves blessed because of the benefits they receive out of outsourcing their projects on online data entering and typing services, because it not only saves their time but also saves a huge amount of money.

Upcoming business companies can focus on their key business functions instead of dealing with non-key business activities. They find it sensible to outsource their confidential and crucial projects to trustworthy online data entry services and remain free for their key business activities. These companies have several layers of quality control which assures 99.9% quality on projects on online data entry.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Advantages-of-Online-Data-Entry-Services&id=6526483

Is Web Scraping Relevant in Today's Business World?

Different techniques and processes have been created and developed over time to collect and analyze data. Web scraping is one of the processes that have hit the business market recently. It is a great process that offers businesses with vast amounts of data from different sources such as websites and databases.

It is good to clear the air and let people know that data scraping is legal process. The main reason is in this case is because the information or data is already available in the internet. It is important to know that it is not a process of stealing information but rather a process of collecting reliable information. Most people have regarded the technique as unsavory behavior. Their main basis of argument is that with time the process will be over flooded and therefore lead to parity in plagiarism.

We can therefore simply define web scraping as a process of collecting data from a wide variety of different websites and databases. The process can be achieved either manually or by the use of software. The rise of data mining companies has led to more use of the web extraction and web crawling process. Other main functions such companies are to process and analyze the data harvested. One of the important aspects about these companies is that they employ experts. The experts are aware of the viable keywords and also the kind of information which can create usable statistic and also the pages that are worth the effort. Therefore the role of data mining companies is not limited to mining of data but also help their clients be able to identify the various relationships and also build the models.

Some of the common methods of web scraping used include web crawling, text gripping, DOM parsing, and expression matching. The latter process can only be achieved through parsers, HTML pages or even semantic annotation. Therefore there are many different ways of scraping the data but most importantly they work towards the same goal. The main objective of using web scraping service is to retrieve and also compile data contained in databases and websites. This is a must process for a business to remain relevant in the business world.

The main questions asked about web scraping touch on relevance. Is the process relevant in the business world? The answer to this question is yes. The fact that it is employed by large companies in the world and has derived many rewards says it all. It is important to note that many people regarded this technology as a plagiarism tool and others consider it as a useful tool that harvests the data required for the business success.

Using of web scraping process to extract data from the internet for competition analysis is highly recommended. If this is the case, then you must be sure to spot any pattern or trend that can work in a given market.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Is-Web-Scraping-Relevant-in-Todays-Business-World?&id=7091414