Text in the HTML document is the content placed between HTML tags like <a> </a> , <title> </title>. When we extract the text in the HTML document, there are two methods that can help us collect the text we want from HTML files.

Programming language

For those simple HTML documents, people who have basic coding knowledge would choose to write a program to remove all HTML tags and retain only the text inside HTML files, using Regular Expression or XPath. There are several widely used programming languages such as C#, Java, Python, JS, PHP, Go and NodeJs that are available for computer programmers. Some of these languages have their own parser for HTML that are available and free online and you will know more about these HTML parsers by click here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_HTML_parsers.

It is worth mentioning that the code you write can only be used for one type of web page, that means different types of web pages needs to write different code. Besides, you need to test your code after you have written your program, and it takes longer time for who have little experience to write code and test the code.

Web data extraction tools

There are many powerful web extraction tools such as import.io, mozenda, Octoparse that are available for you to harvest almost everything on the web page, including the text, links, images, etc. You can convert what you get into structured data format.

You don’ t need to write any code, so it’s good for those who have no coding experience. In most cases, you don’t need to write Regular Expression or XPath. The visualization enable you to better interact with the web pages. It’s easy to check and export the data without any IDE.

Octoparse provides a visual operation pane, just like in a regular browser. You only need to click the data you want to extract, and Octoparse will automatically help you record the operation, generate XPath and extract the data. It can automatically perform the extraction.

Author: The Octoparse Team

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