Step-by-step tutorials for you to get started with web scraping
Download OctoparseLesson 3: Getting data - Capture text from a page
Thursday, June 9, 2022The latest 101 tutorial series are available here. Go to have a check now!
on your PC and learn about the user interface , you are ready to start your own web scraping project. 1) Start a new task and enter the URL of target web page [Download the task file in this lesson]
Once you're logged in, click "+ Task " button of Advanced Mode to create a new task. Then enter one or more URLs.
|
Tips! 1. What is a task? A task means a crawler for scraping data from usually one website with unlimited Page/URL inquiries. Crawlers in Octoparse are determined by the scraping tasks configured. Scraping tasks would tell Octoparse: which website to open and what data to crawl, etc. 2. Why should I use Advanced Mode? Advanced Mode is an incredibly powerful mode offering extended flexibility to accommodate scraping all different kinds of websites. It allows you to customize individual action needed to perform the extraction including keywords searching, login authentication, opening dropdowns, etc. |
Here we take one of our blog posts as an example. Suppose our goal is to extract the blog information from the page.
Copy and paste the URL in "Extraction URL" textbox. Then click on "Save URL" and Octoparse will open the web page in the built-in browser.
URL: https://www.octoparse.com/blog/top-5-web-scraping-tools-comparison
2) Click on target data to capture
Now, start to capture the data you need by clicking directly on the various pieces of information.
When the data is selected properly, the selection will be highlighted in green.
Click on the title of the post, the posted date or the content to capture.
Notice the data you clicked on is now showing on the Action Panel. You can edit the field names by clicking 
or leave till later. Select "Extract Data" to complete the text extraction action.
|
Tips! 1. Turn on “Workflow” button 2. Now in Octoparse 7.X, task name is automatically generated right on the top of configuration interface. To change it, just click the textbox and type in the desired name. Don’t forget to save your changes by clicking |
to preview workflow you design. 
.
3) Save and run the task to capture data
Click "Save and run" from the Action Panel or alternatively, click "Start Extraction" to start running the completed task.
Here is the data we got from running the task.
Lesson 4: Capture a list of items
Download Octoparse to start web scraping or contact us for any
question about web scraping!
