29-04-2021



Recently I come across a tool that takes care of many of the issues you usually face while scraping websites. The tool is called Scraper API which provides an easy to use REST API to scrape a different kind of websites(Simple, JS enabled, Captcha, etc) with quite an ease. Before I proceed further, allow me to introduce Scraper API.

Loading Web Pages with 'request' The requests module allows you to send HTTP. Learn how to build a web scraper in Python with Chris in this episode of CodeLab. Chris will take you step-by-step through all the Python you need. I'm having some trouble with a method for a text scraper that I'm writing. When I test my method within my textscraper.py file it works fine and prints out each line from a chosen.txt file with e.

23 hours ago  It is a python web scraping library to make web scraping smart, automatic fast, and easy. It is lightweight as well it means it will not impact your PC much. A user can easily use this tool for data scraping because of its easy-to-use interface. To get started, you just need to type few lines of codes and you’ll see the magic. Python Web Scraping Tutorial. Web scraping, also called web data mining or web harvesting, is the process of constructing an agent which can extract, parse, download and organize useful information from the web automatically.

What is Scraper API

If you visit their website you’d find their mission statement:

Scraper API handles proxies, browsers, and CAPTCHAs, so you can get the HTML from any web page with a simple API call!

As it suggests, it is offering you all the things to deal with the issues you usually come across while writing your scrapers.

Development

Scraper API provides a REST API that can be consumed in any language. Since this post is related to Python so I’d be mainly focusing on requests library to use this tool.

You must first signup with them and in return, they will provide you an API KEY to use their platform. They provide 1000 free API calls which are enough to test their platform. Otherwise, they offer different plans from starter to the enterprise which you can view here.

Let’s try a simple example which is also giving in the documentation.

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payload={'api_key':API_KEY,'url':URL_TO_SCRAPE,'session_number':'123'}
r=requests.get('http://api.scraperapi.com',params=payload,timeout=60)

And it’d produce the following result:

Can you notice the same proxy IP here?

Creating OLX Scrapper

Web scraper python code

Like previous scraping related posts, I am going to pick OLX again for this post. I will iterate the list first and then will scrape individual items. Below is the complete code.