What is HTML Scraping
HTML scraping, known as web scraping, is a technique that enables you to pull data you want from websites written by HTML.
Generally, many websites will make it easy and available to share their content via RSS feeds, APIs or other forms of structured data. But if you can’t retrieve data from these websites by using APIs, you can use HTML scraping tool which will pull web data straight out of HTML.
With HTML scraping technique, the HTML of a web page is being processed so that you can sift through the HTML document, grab the data you want automatically and save the structured data for your use. Therefore, most HTML scraping tools will mimic human behavior to browse a website and automatically collect information from the website. For those who don’t have any coding knowledge, HTML scraping tool is the best choice to collect information from HTML documents and then save the data available for further use. And of course, most of these tools charge users for the extraction services. It’s definitely worthwhile to pay for the extraction services as data is becoming increasingly valuable for your business.
What Octoparse can do
The easiest way for non-developers to scrape HTML documents is to use a HTML scraping tool. Octoparse is one of the HTML scraping tools that are designed to extract and manipulate HTML document.
It mimics human operations such as click, hover, scroll up/down a web page, flip a web page, etc. and supports features such as branch judgment and cycling. No need to write any code and you will collect data easily from simple web pages. If you know how to match pattern by using RegEx or Xpath, you will find it much easier to use Octoparse. Besides, Octoparse can deal with websites that are loaded or generated dynamically with Java Script, and websites with infinite scrolling, “Load More” links, pagination, etc.
