A web crawler can do this task automatically for you. With the HTML code fetched, you can now start breaking it down to identify the key elements you want to save into a spreadsheet or local database, such as a table with all its data.įor example, you can use web scraping to collect the results of all Premier League matches without having to manually copy-paste every results from a web page with such information. The web crawler starts by fetching (or downloading) a page’s HTML code - the code that represents all the text, links, images, tables, buttons and other elements of the website page you want to get information from – and store it for you to perform further actions with it. You provide your web crawler a page’s URL where the data you are interested in lives. The process of web scraping follows a few simple steps: In short, web scraping is an automated way of copying information from the internet into a format that is more useful for the user to analyse. Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc) to access a web page, retrieve specific HTML elements and download them into CSV files, Excel files or even upload them directly into a database for later analysis. These pieces of code - called bots, web crawlers or spiders - use a web browser in your computer (i.e.

For example, by simply writing a few basic lines of code, you can tell your computer to open a browser window, navigate to a certain web page, load the HTML code of the page, and create a CSV file with the information you want to retrieve, such as a data table. This code can either be written by yourself or executed through a specialised web scraping program. The process of scraping a website for data often consists on writing a piece of code that runs automatic tasks on our behalf.

Webscraper not selecting links