Web scraping has always been taken care of by actual developers, since a lot of coding, proxy management and CAPTCHA-solving is involved. However, the scraped data is very often needed by people that are non-coders: Marketers, Analysts, Business Developers etc.
Zenscrape is an easy-to-use web scraping tool that allows people to scrape websites without having to code.
Let’s run through a quick example together:
Select the data you need
The setup wizard guides you through the process of setting up your data extractor. It allows you to select the information you want to scrape visually. Click on the desired piece of content and specify what type of element you have. Depending on the package you have bought (they also offer a free plan), you can select up to 30 data elements per page.
The scraper is also capable of handling element lists.
Schedule your extractor
Perhaps, you want to scrape the selected data at a specific time interval. Depending on your plan, you can choose any time span between one minute to one hour. Also, decide what is supposed to happen with the scraped data after it has been gathered.
Use your data
In this example, we have chosen the .csv-export method and have selected a 10 minute scraping interval. Our first set of data should be ready by now. Let’s take a look:
Success! Our data is ready for us to be downloaded. We can now access all individual data sets or download all previously gathered data at once, in one file.
Need more flexibility?
Zenscrape also offers a web scraping API that returns the HTML markup of any website. This is especially useful for complicated scraping projects, that require the scraped content to be integrated into a software application for further processing.
Just like the web scraping suite, the API does not forward failed requests and takes care of proxy management, CAPTCHA-solving and all other maintenance tasks that are usually involved with DIY web scrapers.
Since the API returns the full HTML markup of the related website, you have full flexibility in terms of data selection and further processing.
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