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What is Web Scraping | Data Mining

What is Web Scraping and Data Mining

Introduction

Web scraping is a popular term for various significant methods used to extract web metadata or gather valuable information across the Internet. Generally, this is accomplished with exclusive software that simulates web surfing to gather specific bits of information from different websites. Here, you’ll learn how to collect information across the Internet using HAP Web scraping through the HTML agility method.

What is Web Scraping

Learn hap select nodes method

Here, you’ll have the opportunity to Learn hap select nodes method to extract data from other web sources. Also, web scraping is a figure of data mining which helps in extracting valuable data like weather reports, auction details, product images and service details, market pricing, or any other collected information. Web scraping has pinched a lot of debate because some websites never allow certain types of data mining. Notwithstanding the legal confrontation, web scraping is a popular approach of gathering important information as these types of cumulated data resources become more competent. First and foremost step is to know how to install web scraping HTML utility.

Purpose of web scraping

Throughout web scraping programs, some professionals or businessmen will be able to gather some web data to sell to other companies or users, for promotional intention.  Hence, Web scraping is known as screen scraping, data mining, Web harvesting or Web data extraction.

Automatically loads and extracts information

A web scraping application automatically loads and extracts information from various web pages of websites based upon your need. It’s either custom-designed for a precise website or structured to work with any website. Just click the button placed for web scraping you can easily save the data available on the website to a text file on your computer.


Issues with web scraping 

The issue with most valuable web scraping software is that they are very much critical to setup and use. There is a sharp learning curve included. Technology Crowd has designed a special application to get resolved this issue.

Web scraping as data mining

Web scraping as data mining helps in report collection of weather, auction information, market pricing for any product, or any other list of gathered information can be inherited or captured. Sometimes, web scraping is restricted by many websites with respect to data mining, but web scraping is widely utilized to collect aggregated data from different private or government data sources in spite of all legal challenges.

Where can be the extracted data saved?

The extracted web data can be saved to a local file in your pc or to an excel database in table format.

Why Data mining?

Now these days, most of the websites allow viewing the displayed Data only throughout a web browser. They prohibit saving of all this data through ‘copy’ or ‘save as’ function for personal use.  Since the manual procedure of copying and pasting the data from a restricted website becomes a very tiresome job because of spending long hours or days to get the task completed.

Data mining is not tiresome task

Because of the automatic data extraction procedure performed by web scraping, it’s highly recommended to extract data instead of manually copying the information from different web pages.

How to perform data mining?

The web developers can extract text from an HTML page using ‘XpathByHtmlAgility()’ method. For the purpose of extraction data from HTML heading tag, you can type ‘var_extractHeadingTag =doc.documentNode.selectSinglenode(" paste full XPath here")’ and copy & paste the full Xpath of targeted page in the double code of bracket. On running the code, you’ll get the extracted data on your output page. Check our XPath VIDEO for better convenience.
Similarly,  for the purpose of extracting the inner text of the targeted URL, you need to type ‘var_extractText1=doc.documentNode.selectSingleNode("paste the copied full XPath’.innertext")’ and on running the compiler, you’ll obtain the extracted inner text in paragraph lying under the targeted URL.
For more detail about product image extraction, just go through Favicon method, and for text extraction, just check here.

Web scraping as Web harvesting

Basically, web scraping program or software is categorized into two types such as

  • Web scraping for a single website
  • Web scraping for any website

Web scraping for a single website

This program is designed for a particular website to extract data enclosed within the Html tag or XML tag. Since it’s customized for a single website, you can’t use the same program for another website. If you want to use this program for a website, you’ve to replace the Full Xpath or URL of a previous targeted website with a URL of the new targeted website.

Web scraping for any website

However, a complete web scraping software can be designed to extract data from any website by placing the URL in the required text box and clicking on the button.  This application will be robotically loaded and extract data from multiple pages of websites based upon your needs.

Types of data mining

Different types of data mining are practiced by developers. Four approaches are given below.

1. Text pattern fetching

A simple yet influential method to extract text from html pages can be based on the UNIX grep command or regular expression-matching facilities of programming languages (for instance Perl or Python).

2. HTML parsing (Wrapping)

In this data mining method, the wrapper extracts information or text from a specific web page having dynamically encoded data. The most important feature of the wrapper is it detects such dynamic templates in a specific information source, extracts its entire content and translates it into a relevant form. Wrapper making algorithms presume that input web pages of a wrapper orientation system conform to a common template and that they can be easily identified in terms of a URL common scheme.[3] Furthermore, some semi-structured data retrieving languages, like the HTQL and XQuery, can be utilized to parse HTML based web pages and to regain and transform html web page content.

3. HTTP programming

Static and dynamic web pages can be recovered by posting HTTP requests to the distant web server through socket applications.

4. DOM (Document Object model parsing)

By embedding a complete-matured web browser, like the Internet Explorer, Chrome or the Mozilla browser control, the application can recover the dynamic content produced by the client-side scripts. All these browsers also parse the website pages into a DOM tree, based on which web scraping applications can regain parts of the pages.

Conclusion

This XPath based web scraping is most valuable when you’re working with the ASP.Net website. You’ll be able to extract invisible data or copy restricted data from any website that can be sold to others for promotion or for any specific use.

Here is a complete videoes list to mastering with Web Scraping:

SrNo Topics Video Len (Mins) YouTube Link
1 Learn Install html agility pack and Load a HTML Document 5:36 https://youtu.be/MI1QXaIEjb4
2 Extract all Href value from HTML Document using html agility pack 5:39 https://youtu.be/Lhtnb6r7XH4?list=PLJufu9snJTv4tHfmsR-6QA4SPYj5vmp87
3 Extract Meta Information from website using html agility pack 7:37 https://youtu.be/4jdlwMo6Sfc?list=PLJufu9snJTv4tHfmsR-6QA4SPYj5vmp87
4 Select Nodes using Html Agility Pack 10:13 https://youtu.be/tGfOmR94BWs?list=PLJufu9snJTv4tHfmsR-6QA4SPYj5vmp87
5 HTML Manipulation using html agility pack 18:15 https://youtu.be/9LD7Y4UztCE?list=PLJufu9snJTv4tHfmsR-6QA4SPYj5vmp87
6 HTML Traversing (Parent Node) html using Agility Pack C# 6:10 https://youtu.be/BTdFcZkKjKc?list=PLJufu9snJTv4tHfmsR-6QA4SPYj5vmp87
7 HTML Traversing (Parent Node) html using Agility Pack C# 6:10 https://youtu.be/BTdFcZkKjKc?list=PLJufu9snJTv4tHfmsR-6QA4SPYj5vmp87
8 HTML Traversing (Next Sibling) using Agility Pack C# 6:30 https://youtu.be/yS8u1yUCWu8?list=PLJufu9snJTv4tHfmsR-6QA4SPYj5vmp87
9 HTML Traversing (Next Sibling) using Agility Pack C# 6:30 https://youtu.be/yS8u1yUCWu8?list=PLJufu9snJTv4tHfmsR-6QA4SPYj5vmp87
10 How to Extract Image Source using Regex C# 6:03 https://youtu.be/VPQRs54mlzU?list=PLJufu9snJTv4tHfmsR-6QA4SPYj5vmp87
11 Convert UL List into String using HTML Agility Pack C# 6:33 https://youtu.be/3m1X1Xcu4PA?list=PLJufu9snJTv4tHfmsR-6QA4SPYj5vmp87
12 Search Specific Text from HTML using HTML Agility Pack 9:09 https://youtu.be/An1FqrFLvyM?list=PLJufu9snJTv4tHfmsR-6QA4SPYj5vmp87
13 Extract Links From Web Page using HTML Agility Pack C# 7:16 https://youtu.be/VQw-ZsjIYaQ?list=PLJufu9snJTv4tHfmsR-6QA4SPYj5vmp87
14 Extract Icon from Website using HTML Agility Pack C# 6:46 https://youtu.be/QQRdMGy9wcI?list=PLJufu9snJTv4tHfmsR-6QA4SPYj5vmp87
15 How to parse HTML table using HTML Agility Pack C# 13:04 https://youtu.be/BGTYeNwRf8s?list=PLJufu9snJTv4tHfmsR-6QA4SPYj5vmp87
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Anjan kant

Outstanding journey in Microsoft Technologies (ASP.Net, C#, SQL Programming, WPF, Silverlight, WCF etc.), client side technologies AngularJS, KnockoutJS, Javascript, Ajax Calls, Json and Hybrid apps etc. I love to devote free time in writing, blogging, social networking and adventurous life

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