introduction Link to heading
- Web scraping refers to the extraction of data from a website, where the information is collected and then exported into a format that is more useful for the users, e.g. a spreadsheet or an API (Perez, 2023).
- Web scraping is used to scape data from webpages automatically on large scale, where it is performed to convert data in complex HTML structures to structured format as a spreadsheet or database, which later used for various purposes such as research, analysis, and automation (Dhanashree, 2023).
- Search engines like Google scrape the web to index sites and provide them as results for users’ queries (Martinez, 2023).
legality Link to heading
- There is no law or rule banning web scraping, but it does not mean every information on every webs can be scaped (Urban, 2023).
- There is nothing inherently illegal about web scraping, since when a website publishes data, it is usually available to the public, and as a result, free to scrape (Holcombe, 2023).
- Web scraping is actually not illegal on its own but one should be ethical while doing it, since when it is done in a good way it can help us to make the best use of the web, e.g. search engine like Google (madhur912, 2023).
illustration Link to heading
- Google search for
butiran.jswill give the result as in https://www.google.com/search?q=butiran.js.
- Google scraps a website and shows some information about it as given above.
hands-on Link to heading
- Install Node.js: Server-side web applications using JavaScript
- My first web server: Begin the journey with Node.js
- Scraping your webpage: Using Node.js to scrap you GitHub Pages webpage
notes Link to heading
- Screenshot in Google Chrome is captured using a Chrome extension, SVG Screenshot.