Thursday 28 May 2015

Data Scraping Services - Web Scraping Video Tutorial Collection for All Programming Language

Web scraping is a mechanism in which request made to website URL to get  HTML Document text and that text then parsed to extract data from the HTML codes.  Website scraping for data is a generalize approach and can be implemented in any programming language like PHP, Java, C#, Python and many other.

There are many Web scraping software available in market using which you can extract data with no coding knowledge. In many case the scraping doesn’t help due to custom crawling flow for data scraping and in that case you have to make your own web scraping application in one of the programming language you know. In this post I have collected scraping video tutorials for all programming language.

I mostly familiar with web scraping using PHP, C# and some other scraping tools and providing web scraping service.  If you have any scraping requirement send me your requirements and I will get back with sample data scrape and best price.

Web Scraping Using PHP

You can do web scraping in PHP using CURL library and Simple HTML DOM parsing library.  PHP function file_get_content() can also be useful for making web request. One drawback of scraping using PHP is it can’t parse JavaScript so ajax based scraping can’t be possible using PHP.

Web Scraping Using C#

There are many library available in .Net for HTML parsing and data scraping. I have used Web Browser control and HTML Agility Pack for data extraction in .Net using C#

I have didn’t done web scraping in Java, PERL and Python. I had learned web scraping in node.js using Casper.JS and Phantom.JS library. But I thought below tutorial will be helpful for some one who are Java and Python based.

Web Scraping Using Jsoup in Java

Scraping Stock Data Using Python

Develop Web Crawler Using PERL

Web Scraping Using Node.Js

If you find any other good web scraping video tutorial then you can share the link in comment so other readesr get benefit form that.

Source: http://webdata-scraping.com/web-scraping-video-tutorial-collection-programming-language/

Tuesday 26 May 2015

Web Scraping Services - Extracting Business Data You Need

Would you like to have someone collect, extract, find or scrap contact details, stats, list, extract data, or information from websites, online stores, directories, and more?

"Hi-Tech BPO Services offers 100% risk-free, quick, accurate and affordable web scraping, data scraping, screen scraping, data collection, data extraction, and website scraping services to worldwide organizations ranging from medium-sized business firms to Fortune 500 companies."

At Hi-Tech BPO Services we are helping global businesses build their own database, mailing list, generate leads, and get access to vast resources of unstructured data available on World Wide Web.

We scrape data from various sources such as websites, blogs, podcasts, and online directories; and convert them into structured formats such as excel, csv, access, text, My SQL using automated and manual scraping technologies. Through our web data scraping services, we crawl through websites and gather sales leads, competitor’s product details, new offers, pricing methodologies, and various other types of information from the web.

Our web scraping services scrape data such as name, email, phone number, address, country, state, city, product, and pricing details among others.

Areas of Expertise in Web Scraping:

•    Contact Details
•    Statistics data from websites
•    Classifieds
•    Real estate portals
•    Social networking sites
•    Government portals
•    Entertainment sites
•    Auction portals
•    Business directories
•    Job portals
•    Email ids and Profiles
•    URLs in an excel spreadsheet
•    Market place portals
•    Search engine and SEO
•    Accessories portals
•    News portals
•    Online shopping portals
•    Hotels and restaurant
•    Event portals
•    Lead generation

Industries we Serve:

Our web scraping services are suitable for industries including real estate, information technology, university, hospital, medicine, property, restaurant, hotels, banking, finance, insurance, media/entertainment, automobiles, marketing, human resources, manufacturing, healthcare, academics, travel, telecommunication and many more.

Why Hi-Tech BPO Services for Web Scraping?

•    Skilled and committed scraping experts
•    Accurate solutions
•    Highly cost-effective pricing strategies
•    Presence of satisfied clients worldwide
•    Using latest and effectual web scraping technologies
•    Ensures timely delivery
•    Round the clock customer support and technical assistance

Get Quick Cost and Time Estimate

Source: http://www.hitechbposervices.com/web-scraping.php

Monday 25 May 2015

Which language is the most flexible for scraping websites?

3 down vote favorite

I'm new to programming. I know a little python and a little objective c, and I've been going through tutorials for each. Then it occurred to me, I need to know which language is more flexible (python, obj c, something else) for screen scraping a website for content.

What do I mean by "flexible"?

Well, ideally, I need something that will be easy to refactor and tweak for similar projects. I'm trying to avoid doing a lot of re-writing (well, re-coding) if I wanted to switch some of the variables in the program (i.e., the website to be scraped, the content to fetch, etc).

Anyways, if you could please give me your opinion, that would be great. Oh, and if you know any existing frameworks for the language you recommend, please share. (I know a little about Selenium and BeautifulSoup for python already).

4 Answers

I recently wrote a relatively complex web scraper to harvest a TON of data. It had to do some relatively complex parsing, I needed it to stuff it into a database, etc. I'm C# programmer now and formerly a Perl guy.

I wrote my original scraper using Python. I started on a Thursday and by Sunday morning I was harvesting over about a million scores from a show horse site. I used Python and SQLlite because they were fast.

HOWEVER, as I started putting together programs to regularly keep the data updated and to populate the SQL Server that would backend my MVC3 application, I kept hitting snags and gaps in my Python knowledge.

In the end, I completely rewrote the scraper/parser in C# using the HtmlAgilityPack and it works better than before (and just about as fast).

Because I KNEW THE LANGUAGE and the environment so much better I was able to add better database support, better logging, better error handling, etc. etc.

So... short answer.. Python was the fastest to market with a "good enough for now" solution, but the language I know best (C#) was the best long-term solution.

EDIT: I used BeautifulSoup for my original crawler written in Python.

5 down vote

The most flexible is the one that you're most familiar with.

Personally, I use Python for almost all of my utilities. For scraping, I find that its functionality specific to parsing and string manipulation requires little code, is fast and there are a ton of examples out there (strong community). Chances are that someone's already written whatever you're trying to do already, or there's at least something along the same lines that needs very little refactoring.

1 down vote

I think its safe to say that Python is a better place to start than Objective C. Honestly, just about any language meets the "flexible" requirement. All you need is well thought out configuration parameters. Also, a dynamic language like Python can go a long way in increasing flexibility, provided that you account for runtime type errors.

1 down vote

I recently wrote a very simple web-scraper; I chose Common Lisp as I'm learning the language.

On the basis of my experience - both of the language and the availability of help from experienced Lispers - I recommend investigating Common Lisp for your purpose.

There are excellent XML-parsing libraries available for CL, as well as libraries for parsing invalid HTML, which you'll need unless the sites you're parsing consist solely of valid XHTML.

Also, Common Lisp is a good language in which to implement DSLs; a DSL for web-scraping may be a solution to your requirement for flexibility & re-use.

Source: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/74998/which-language-is-the-most-flexible-for-scraping-websites/75006#75006


Friday 22 May 2015

Scraping Data: Site-specific Extractors vs. Generic Extractors

Scraping is becoming a rather mundane job with every other organization getting its feet wet with it for their own data gathering needs. There have been enough number of crawlers built – some open-sourced and others internal to organizations for in-house utilities. Although crawling might seem like a simple technique at the onset, doing this at a large-scale is the real deal. You need to have a distributed stack set up to take care of handling huge volumes of data, to provide data in a low-latency model and also to deal with fail-overs. This still is achievable after crossing the initial tech barrier and via continuous optimizations. (P.S. Not under-estimating this part because it still needs a team of Engineers monitoring the stats and scratching their heads at times).

Social Media Scraping

Focused crawls on a predefined list of sites

However, you bump into a completely new land if your goal is to generate clean and usable data sets from these crawls i.e. “extract” data in a format that your DB can process and aid in generating insights. There are 2 ways of tackling this:

a. site-specific extractors which give desired results

b. generic extractors that result in few surprises

Assuming you still do focused crawls on a predefined list of sites, let’s go over specific scenarios when you have to pick between the two-

1. Mass-scale crawls; high-level meta data – Use generic extractors when you have a large-scale crawling requirement on a continuous basis. Large-scale would mean having to crawl sites in the range of hundreds of thousands. Since the web is a jungle and no two sites share the same template, it would be impossible to write an extractor for each. However, you have to settle in with just the document-level information from such crawls like the URL, meta keywords, blog or news titles, author, date and article content which is still enough information to be happy with if your requirement is analyzing sentiment of the data.

cb1c0_one-size

A generic extractor case

Generic extractors don’t yield accurate results and often mess up the datasets deeming it unusable. Reason being

programatically distinguishing relevant data from irrelevant datasets is a challenge. For example, how would the extractor know to skip pages that have a list of blogs and only extract the ones with the complete article. Or delineating article content from the title on a blog page is not easy either.

To summarize, below is what to expect of a generic extractor.

Pros-

•    minimal manual intervention
•    low on effort and time
•    can work on any scale

Cons-

•    Data quality compromised
•    inaccurate and incomplete datasets
•    lesser details suited only for high-level analyses
•    Suited for gathering- blogs, forums, news
•    Uses- Sentiment Analysis, Brand Monitoring, Competitor Analysis, Social Media Monitoring.

2. Low/Mid scale crawls; detailed datasets – If precise extraction is the mandate, there’s no going away from site-specific extractors. But realistically this is do-able only if your scope of work is limited i.e. few hundred sites or less. Using site-specific extractors, you could extract as many number of fields from any nook or corner of the web pages. Most of the times, most pages on a website share similar templates. If not, they can still be accommodated for using site-specific extractors.

cutlery

Designing extractor for each website

Pros-

•    High data quality
•    Better data coverage on the site

Cons-

High on effort and time

Site structures keep changing from time to time and maintaining these requires a lot of monitoring and manual intervention

Only for limited scale

Suited for gathering – any data from any domain on any site be it product specifications and price details, reviews, blogs, forums, directories, ticket inventories, etc.

Uses- Data Analytics for E-commerce, Business Intelligence, Market Research, Sentiment Analysis

Conclusion

Quite obviously you need both such extractors handy to take care of various use cases. The only way generic extractors can work for detailed datasets is if everyone employs standard data formats on the web (Read our post on standard data formats here). However, given the internet penetration to the masses and the variety of things folks like to do on the web, this is being overly futuristic.

So while site-specific extractors are going to be around for quite some time, the challenge now is to tweak the generic ones to work better. At PromptCloud, we have added ML components to make them smarter and they have been working well for us so far.

What have your challenges been? Do drop in your comments.

Source: https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/scraping-data-site-specific-extractors-vs-generic-extractors/

Wednesday 20 May 2015

The Features of the "Holographic Meridian Scraping Therapy"

1. Systematic nature: Brief introduction to the knowledge of viscera, meridians and points in traditional Chinese medicine, theory of holographic diagnosis and treatment; preliminary discussion of the treatment and health care mechanism of scraping therapy; systemat­ic introduction to the concrete methods of the holographic meridian scraping therapy; enumerating a host of therapeutic methods of scraping for disorders in both Chinese and Western medicine to em­body a combination of disease differentiation and syndrome differen­tiation; and summarizing the health care scraping methods. It is a practical handbook of gua sha.

2. Scientific: Applying the theories of Chinese and Western medicine to explain the health care and treatment mechanism and clinical applications of scraping therapy; introducing in detail the practical manipulations, items for attention, and indications and contraindications of the scraping therapy. Here are introduced repre­sentative diseases in different clinical departments, for which scrap­ing therapy has a better curative effect and the therapeutic methods of scraping for these diseases. Stress is placed on disease differentia­tion in Western medicine and syndrome differentiation in Chinese medicine, which should be combined in practical application.

Although there are more than 140,000 kinds of disease known to modem medicine, all diseases are related to dysfunction of the 14 meridians and internal organs, according to traditional Chinese med­icine. The object of scraping therapy is to correct the disharmony in the meridians and internal organs to recover the normal bodily func­tions. Thus, the scraping of a set of meridian points can be used to treat many diseases. In the section on clinical application only about 100 kinds of common diseases are discussed, although the actual number is much more than that. For easy reference the "Index of Diseases and Symptoms" is appended at the back of the book.

3. Practical: Using simple language and plenty of pictures and diagrams to guarantee that readers can easily leam, memorize and apply the principles of scraping therapy. As long as they master the methods explained in Chapter Three, readers without any medical knowledge can apply scraping therapy to themselves or others, with reference to the pictures in Chapters Four and Five. Besides scraping therapy, herbal treatment for each disease or syndrome is explained and may be used in combination with the scraping techniques.

Referring to the Holographic Meridian Hand Diagnosis and pic­tures at the back of the book will enhance accuracy of diagnosis and increase the effectiveness of scraping therapy.

Since the first publication and distribution of the Chinese edition of the book in July 1995, it has been welcomed by both medical specialists and lay people. In March 1996 this book was republished and adopted as a textbook by the School for Advanced Studies of Traditional Chinese Medicine affiliated to the Institute of the Acu­puncture and Moxibustion of the China Academy of Traditional Chi­nese Medicine.

In order to bring this health care method to more and more peo­ple and to make traditional Chinese medicine better appreciated They have modified and replenished this book in the spirit of constant im­provement. They hope that they may make a contribution to the health care of mankind with this natural therapy which has no side-effects and causes no pollution.

They hope that the Holographic Meridian Scraping Therapy can help the health and happiness of more and more families in the world.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Features-of-the-Holographic-Meridian-Scraping-Therapy&id=5005031

Sunday 17 May 2015

Dapper: The Scraper for the Common Man

Sometimes, especially with Web 2.0 companies, jargon can get a little bit out of hand. When someone says that a service allows you to "build an API for any website", it can be a bit difficult to understand what that really means.

However, put simply, Dapper is a scraper. Nothing more. It allows you to scrape content from a Web page and convert it into an XML document that can be easily used at another location. Though you won't find the words "scrape" or "scraper" anywhere on its site, that is exactly what it does.

What separates Dapper from other scrapers, both legitimate and illegitimate, is that it is both free and easy to use. In short, it makes the process of setting up the scraper simple enough for your every day Internet user. While one has never needed to be a geek to scrape RSS feeds, now the technologically impaired can scrape content from any site, even those that don't publish RSS feeds.

Though the TechCrunch profile of the service says that Dapper "aims to offer some legitimate, valuable services and set up a means to respect copyright" others are expressing concern about the potential for copyright violations, especially by spam bloggers.

Either way though, both the cause for concern and the potential dangers are very, very real.

What is Dapper

When a user goes to create a new "Dapp", he or she first needs to provide a series of links. These links must be on the same domain and in similar formats (IE: Google searches for different terms or different blog posts on a single site) for the service to work. Once the links have been defined, the user is then taken to a GUI where they pick out fields.

In a simple example where the user would create their own RSS feed for a blog, the post title might be one field, perhaps called "post title" and the body would be a second, perhaps called "post body". Dapper, much like the service social bookmarking Clipmarks, is able able to intelligently select blocks of text on a Web page, making it easy to ensure that the entire post body is selected and that extraneous information is omitted.

Once the fields have been selected, the user can then either create groups based upon those fields or simply save the dapp for future use. Once the Dapp has been saved, they can then use it to create both raw XML data, an RSS feed, a Google Gadget or any number of other output files that can be easily used in other services.

If you are interested in viewing a demo of Dapper, you can do so at this link.

There is little doubt that Dapper is an impressive service. It has taken the black art of scraping and made it into a simple, easy-to-use application that just about anyone can pick up. Though it might take a few tries to create a working Dapp, and certainly spending some time reading up on the service is required, most will find it easy to use, especially when compared to the alternatives.

However, it's this ease of use that has so many worried. Though scrapers have been around for many years, they have been either difficult to use or expensive. Dapper's power, when combined with its price tag and sheer ease of use, has many wondered that it might be ushering not a new age for the Web, but a new age for scrapers seeking to abuse other's hard work.

Cause for Concern

While being easy to use or free is not necessarily a problem in and of itself, in the rush to enable users to make an API for any site, they forget that many sites don't have one or restrict access to their APIs for very good reasons. RSS scraping is perhaps the biggest copyright issue bloggers face. It enables a plagiarist or spammer to not only steal all of the content on the blog right then, but also all of the content that will be posted in the future. This is a huge concern for many bloggers, especially those concerned about performing well in the search engines.

This has prompted many blogs to either disable their RSS feeds, truncate them or move them to a feed monitoring service such as Feedburner. However, if users can simply create their own RSS feeds with ease, these protections are circumvented and Webmasters lose control over their content.

Even with potential copyright abuse issues aside, Dapper creates potential problems for Webmasters. It bypasses the usual metrics that site owners have. A user who reads a site, or large portions of it, through a Dapp will not be counted in either the feed statistics or, depending on how Dapper is set up, even in the site's logs. All the while, the site is spending precious resources to feed the Dapp, taking money out of the Webmaster's pocket.

This combination of greater expense, less traffic and less accurate metrics can be dangerous to Webmasters who are working to get accurate traffic counts, visitor feedback or revenue.

Worse still, Dapp users also bypass any ads or other monetization tools that might be included in the site or the original RSS feed. This has a direct impact on sites trying to either turn a profit or, like this one, recoup some of the costs of hosting.

Despite this, it's the copyright concerns that reign supreme. Though screen scraping is not necessarily an evil technology, it is the sinister uses that have gotten the most attention and, sadly, seem to be the most common, especially in regards to blogs.

Even if the makers of Dapper is aiming to add copyright protection at a later date, the service is fully functional today and, though the FAQ states that they will "comply with any verified request by the lawful owner of the content to cease using his content," there is no opt-out procedure, no DMCA information on the United States Copyright Office Web site, no information on how to prevent Dapper from accessing your site and nothing but a contact page to get in touch with the makers of the service.

(Note: An email sent to the makers of Dapper on the 22nd has, as of yet, gone unanswered)

In addition to creating a potential copyright nightmare for Webmasters the site seems to be setting itself up for a lawsuit. In addition to not being DMCA Safe Harbor compliant (PDF), thus opening it up to copyright infringement lawsuits directly, the service seems to be vulnerable to a lawsuit under the MGM v. Grokster case, which found that service providers can be sued for infringement conducted by its users if they fail an "inducement" test. Sadly for Dapper, simply saying that it is the user's responsibility is not adequate to pass such a test, as Grokster found out. The failure to offer filtering technology and encouragement to create API's for "any" site are both likely strikes against Dapper in that regard.

To make matters more grim, copyright is not the only issue scrapers have to worry about, as one pair of lawyers put it, there are at least four different different legal theories that make scraping illegal including the computer fraud and abuse act, trespass against chattels and breach of contract. All in all, copyright is practically the least of Dapper's problems.

When it's all said and done, there is a lot of room for concern, not just on the part of Webmasters that might be affected by Dapper or its users, but also its makers. These intellectual property and other legal issues could easily sink the entire project.

Conclusions

It is obvious that a lot of time and effort went into creating Dapper. It's a very powerful, easy to use service that opens up interesting possibilities. I would hate to see the service used for ill and I would hate even worse to see all of the hard work that went into it lost because of intellectual property issues.

However, in its current incarnation, it seems likely that Dapper is going to encounter significant resistance on the IP front. There is little, if any protection or regard for intellectual property under the current system and, once bloggers find out that their content is being syndicated without their permission by the service, many are likely to start raising a fuss.

Even though Dapper has gotten rave reviews in the Web 2.0 community, it seems likely that traditional bloggers and other Web site owners will have serious objections to it. Those people, sadly, most likely have never heard of Dapper at this point.

With that being said, it is a service everyone needs to make note of. The one thing that is for certain is that it will be in the news again. The only question is what light will it be under.

Source: https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2006/08/24/dapper-the-scraper-for-the-common-man/

Wednesday 6 May 2015

Web Scraping Services Are Important Tools For Knowledge

Data extraction and web scraping techniques are important tools to find relevant data and information for personal or business use. Many companies, self-employed to copy and paste data from web pages. This process is very reliable, but very expensive as it is a waste of time and effort to get results. This is because the data collected and spent less resources and time required to collect these data are compared.

At present, several mining companies and their websites effective web scraping technique specifically for the thousands of pages of information developed culture can be traced. The information from a CSV file, database, XML file, or any other source with the required format is alameda. understanding of correlations and patterns in the data, so that policies can be designed to assist decision making. The information can also be stored for future reference.

The following are some common examples of data extraction process:

In order to rule through a government portal, citizens who are reliable for a given survey name removed.

Competitive pricing and data products include scraping websites

To access the web site or web design Stock download the videos and photos of scratching

Automatic Data Collection

It regularly collects data on a regular basis. Automated data collection techniques are very important because they find the company’s customer trends and market trends to help. By determining market trends, it is possible to understand customer behavior and predict the likelihood of the data will change.

The following are some examples of automated data collection:

Monitoring of special hourly rates for stocks

collects daily mortgage rates from various financial institutions

on a regular basis is necessary to check the weather

By using web scraping services, you can extract all data related to your business. Then analyzed the data to a spreadsheet or database can be downloaded and compared. Storing data in a database or in a required format and interpretation of the correlations to understand and makes it easier to identify hidden patterns.

Data extraction services, it is possible pricing, email, databases, profile data, and consistently to competitors for information about the data. Different techniques and processes designed to collect and analyze data, and has developed over time. Web Scraping for business processes that have beaten the market recently is one. It is a process from various sources such as websites and databases with large amounts of data provides.

Some of the most common methods used to scrape web crawling, text, fun, DOM analysis and include matching expression. After the process is only analyzers, HTML pages or meaning can be achieved through annotations. There are many different ways of scaling data, but more importantly is working toward the same goal. The main purpose of using web scraping service to retrieve and compile data in databases and web sites. In the business world is to remain relevant to the business process.

The central question about the relevance of web scraping contact. The process is relevant to the business world? The answer is yes. The fact that it is used by large companies in the world and many awards speaks derivatives.

Source: http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/web-scraping-services-are-important-tools-for-knowledge