Web Scraper Shortcode WordPress Plugin Review

This short post is on the WP-plugin called Web Scraper Shortcode, that enables one to retrieve a portion of a web page or a whole page and insert it directly into a post. This plugin might be used for getting fresh data or images from web pages for your WordPress driven page without even visiting it. More scraping plugins and sowtware you can find in here.

To install it in WordPress go to Plugins -> Add New.
Usage

The plugin scrapes the page content and applies parameters to this scraped page if specified. To use the plugin just insert the

[web-scraper ]

shortcode into the HTML view of the WordPress page where you want to display the excerpts of a page or the whole page. The parameters are as follows:

    url (self explanatory)
    element – the dom navigation element notation, similar to XPath.
    limit – the maximum number of elements to be scraped and inserted if the element notation points to several of them (like elements of the same class).

The use of the plugin is of the dom (Data Object Model) notation, where consecutive dom nodes are stated like node1.node2; for example: element = ‘div.img’. The specific element scrape goes thru ‘#notation’. Example: if you want to scrape several ‘div’ elements of the class ‘red’ (<div class=’red’>…<div>), you need to specify the element attribute this way: element = ‘div#red’.
How to find DOM notation?

But for inexperienced users, how is it possible to find the dom notation of the desired element(s) from the web page? Web Developer Tools are a handy means for this. I would refer you to this paragraph on how to invoke Web Developer Tools in the browser (Google Chrome) and select a single page element to inspect it. As you select it with the ‘loupe’ tool, on the bottom line you’ll see the blue box with the element’s dom notation:


The plugin content

As one who works with web scraping, I was curious about  the means that the plugin uses for scraping. As I looked at the plugin code, it turned out that the plugin acquires a web page through ‘simple_html_dom‘ class:

    require_once(‘simple_html_dom.php’);
    $html = file_get_html($url);
    then the code performs iterations over the designated elements with the set limit

Pitfalls

    Be careful if you put two or more [web-scraper] shortcodes on your website, since downloading other pages will drastically slow the page load speed. Even if you want only a small element, the PHP engine first loads the whole page and then iterates over its elements.
    You need to remember that many pictures on the web are indicated by shortened URLs. So when such an image gets extracted it might be visible to you in this way: , since the URL is shortened and the plugin does not take note of  its base URL.
    The error “Fatal error: Call to a member function find() on a non-object …” will occur if you put this shortcode in a text-overloaded post.

Summary

I’d recommend using this plugin for short posts to be added with other posts’ elements. The use of this plugin is limited though.



Source: http://extract-web-data.com/web-scraper-shortcode-wordpress-plugin-review/

Visual Web Ripper: Using External Input Data Sources

Sometimes it is necessary to use external data sources to provide parameters for the scraping process. For example, you have a database with a bunch of ASINs and you need to scrape all product information for each one of them. As far as Visual Web Ripper is concerned, an input data source can be used to provide a list of input values to a data extraction project. A data extraction project will be run once for each row of input values.

An input data source is normally used in one of these scenarios:

    To provide a list of input values for a web form
    To provide a list of start URLs
    To provide input values for Fixed Value elements
    To provide input values for scripts

Visual Web Ripper supports the following input data sources:

    SQL Server Database
    MySQL Database
    OleDB Database
    CSV File
    Script (A script can be used to provide data from almost any data source)

To see it in action you can download a sample project that uses an input CSV file with Amazon ASIN codes to generate Amazon start URLs and extract some product data. Place both the project file and the input CSV file in the default Visual Web Ripper project folder (My Documents\Visual Web Ripper\Projects).

For further information please look at the manual topic, explaining how to use an input data source to generate start URLs.


Source: http://extract-web-data.com/visual-web-ripper-using-external-input-data-sources/

Scraping Amazon.com with Screen Scraper

Let’s look how to use Screen Scraper for scraping Amazon products having a list of asins in external database.

Screen Scraper is designed to be interoperable with all sorts of databases and web-languages. There is even a data-manager that allows one to make a connection to a database (MySQL, Amazon RDS, MS SQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, etc), and then the scripting in screen-scraper is agnostic to the type of database.

Let’s go through a sample scrape project you can see it at work. I don’t know how well you know Screen Scraper, but I assume you have it installed, and a MySQL database you can use. You need to:

    Make sure screen-scraper is not running as workbench or server
    Put the Amazon (Scraping Session).sss file in the “screen-scraper enterprise edition/import” directory.
    Put the mysql-connector-java-5.1.22-bin.jar file in the “screen-scraper enterprise edition/lib/ext” directory.
    Create a MySQL database for the scrape to use, and import the amazon.sql file.
    Put the amazon.db.config file in the “screen-scraper enterprise edition/input” directory and edit it to contain proper settings to connect to your database.
    Start the screen scraper workbench

Since this is a very simple scrape, you just want to run it in the workbench (most of the time you want to run scrapes in server mode). Start the workbench, and you will see the Amazon scrape in there, and you can just click the “play” button.

Note that a breakpoint comes up for each item. It would be easy to save the scraped details to a database table or file if you want. Also see in the database the “id_status” changes as each item is scraped.

When the scrape is run, it looks in the database for products marked “not scraped”, so when you want to re-run the scrapes, you need to:

UPDATE asin
SET `id_status` = 0

Have a nice scraping! ))

P.S. We thank Jason Bellows from Ekiwi, LLC for such a great tutorial.


Source: http://extract-web-data.com/scraping-amazon-com-with-screen-scraper/

Using External Input Data in Off-the-shelf Web Scrapers

There is a question I’ve wanted to shed some light upon for a long time already: “What if I need to scrape several URL’s based on data in some external database?“.

For example, recently one of our visitors asked a very good question (thanks, Ed):

    “I have a large list of amazon.com asin. I would like to scrape 10 or so fields for each asin. Is there any web scraping software available that can read each asin from a database and form the destination url to be scraped like http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/{asin} and scrape the data?”

This question impelled me to investigate this matter. I contacted several web scraper developers, and they kindly provided me with detailed answers that allowed me to bring the following summary to your attention:
Visual Web Ripper

An input data source can be used to provide a list of input values to a data extraction project. A data extraction project will be run once for each row of input values. You can find the additional information here.
Web Content Extractor

You can use the -at”filename” command line option to add new URLs from TXT or CSV file:

    WCExtractor.exe projectfile -at”filename” -s

projectfile: the file name of the project (*.wcepr) to open.
filename – the file name of the CSV or TXT file that contains URLs separated by newlines.
-s – starts the extraction process

You can find some options and examples here.
Mozenda

Since Mozenda is cloud-based, the external data needs to be loaded up into the user’s Mozenda account. That data can then be easily used as part of the data extracting process. You can construct URLs, search for strings that match your inputs, or carry through several data fields from an input collection and add data to it as part of your output. The easiest way to get input data from an external source is to use the API to populate data into a Mozenda collection (in the user’s account). You can also input data in the Mozenda web console by importing a .csv file or importing one through our agent building tool.

Once the data is loaded into the cloud, you simply initiate building a Mozenda web agent and refer to that Data list. By using the Load page action and the variable from the inputs, you can construct a URL like http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/%asin%.
Helium Scraper

Here is a video showing how to do this with Helium Scraper:


The video shows how to use the input data as URLs and as search terms. There are many other ways you could use this data, way too many to fit in a video. Also, if you know SQL, you could run a query to get the data directly from an external MS Access database like
SELECT * FROM [MyTable] IN "C:\MyDatabase.mdb"

Note that the database needs to be a “.mdb” file.
WebSundew Data Extractor
Basically this allows using input data from external data sources. This may be CSV, Excel file or a Database (MySQL, MSSQL, etc). Here you can see how to do this in the case of an external file, but you can do it with a database in a similar way (you just need to write an SQL script that returns the necessary data).
In addition to passing URLs from the external sources you can pass other input parameters as well (input fields, for example).
Screen Scraper

Screen Scraper is really designed to be interoperable with all sorts of databases. We have composed a separate article where you can find a tutorial and a sample project about scraping Amazon products based on a list of their ASINs.


Source: http://extract-web-data.com/using-external-input-data-in-off-the-shelf-web-scrapers/

Selenium IDE and Web Scraping

Selenium is a browser automation framework that includes IDE, Remote Control server and bindings of various flavors including Java, .Net, Ruby, Python and other. In this post we touch on the basic structure of the framework and its application to  Web Scraping.
What is Selenium IDE


Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium scripts. It is implemented as a Firefox plugin, and it allows recording browsers’ interactions in order to edit them. This works well for software tests, composing and debugging. The Selenium Remote Control is a server specific for a particular environment; it causes custom scripts to be implemented for controlled browsers. Selenium deploys on Windows, Linux, and iOS. How various Selenium components are supported with major browsers read here.
What does Selenium do and Web Scraping

Basically Selenium automates browsers. This ability is no doubt to be applied to web scraping. Since browsers (and Selenium) support JavaScript, jQuery and other methods working with dynamic content why not use this mix for benefit in web scraping, rather than to try to catch Ajax events with plain code? The second reason for this kind of scrape automation is browser-fasion data access (though today this is emulated with most libraries).

Yes, Selenium works to automate browsers, but how to control Selenium from a custom script to automate a browser for web scraping? There are Selenium PHP and other language libraries (bindings) providing for scripts to call and use Selenium. It is possible to write Selenium clients (using the libraries) in almost any language we prefer, for example Perl, Python, Java, PHP etc. Those libraries (API), along with a server, the Java written server that invokes browsers for actions, constitute the Selenum RC (Remote Control). Remote Control automatically loads the Selenium Core into the browser to control it. For more details in Selenium components refer to here.


A tough scrape task for programmer

“…cURL is good, but it is very basic.  I need to handle everything manually; I am creating HTTP requests by hand.
This gets difficult – I need to do a lot of work to make sure that the requests that I send are exactly the same as the requests that a browser would
send, both for my sake and for the website’s sake. (For my sake
because I want to get the right data, and for the website’s sake
because I don’t want to cause error messages or other problems on their site because I sent a bad request that messed with their web application).  And if there is any important javascript, I need to imitate it with PHP.
It would be a great benefit to me to be able to control a browser like Firefox with my code. It would solve all my problems regarding the emulation of a real browser…
it seems that Selenium will allow me to do this…” -Ryan S

Yes, that’s what we will consider below.
Scrape with Selenium

In order to create scripts that interact with the Selenium Server (Selenium RC, Selenium Remote Webdriver) or create local Selenium WebDriver script, there is the need to make use of language-specific client drivers (also called Formatters, they are included in the selenium-ide-1.10.0.xpi package). The Selenium servers, drivers and bindings are available at Selenium download page.
The basic recipe for scrape with Selenium:

    Use Chrome or Firefox browsers
    Get Firebug or Chrome Dev Tools (Cntl+Shift+I) in action.
    Install requirements (Remote control or WebDriver, libraries and other)
    Selenium IDE : Record a ‘test’ run thru a site, adding some assertions.
    Export as a Python (other language) script.
    Edit it (loops, data extraction, db input/output)
    Run script for the Remote Control

The short intro Slides for the scraping of tough websites with Python & Selenium are here (as Google Docs slides) and here (Slide Share).
Selenium components for Firefox installation guide

For how to install the Selenium IDE to Firefox see  here starting at slide 21. The Selenium Core and Remote Control installation instructions are there too.
Extracting for dynamic content using jQuery/JavaScript with Selenium

One programmer is doing a similar thing …

1. launch a selenium RC (remote control) server
2. load a page
3. inject the jQuery script
4. select the interested contents using jQuery/JavaScript
5. send back to the PHP client using JSON.

He particularly finds it quite easy and convenient to use jQuery for
screen scraping, rather than using PHP/XPath.
Conclusion

The Selenium IDE is the popular tool for browser automation, mostly for its software testing application, yet also in that Web Scraping techniques for tough dynamic websites may be implemented with IDE along with the Selenium Remote Control server. These are the basic steps for it:

    Record the ‘test‘ browser behavior in IDE and export it as the custom programming language script
    Formatted language script runs on the Remote Control server that forces browser to send HTTP requests and then script catches the Ajax powered responses to extract content.

Selenium based Web Scraping is an easy task for small scale projects, but it consumes a lot of memory resources, since for each request it will launch a new browser instance.



Source: http://extract-web-data.com/selenium-ide-and-web-scraping/

Elevate Your Business With Data Entry Services

The sole aim of many organizations is to progress well in their objectives and hire people who are good and efficient in their work. However, sometimes, there are some work profiles that are mundane in nature but equally important like data entry services. You will be amazed to know that these services also play a crucial role in building the future of an organization.

In fact, with the coming of information technology, the data entry services have actually become a kind of industry, as various businesses need accurate and detailed information for various reasons. Thus they are relying on such services that not only help them in growing but are cost effective too. These data entry services are an asset for any organization irrespective of its size in both the terms of workforce, financial status and area. With the help of such services you are able to get the information on the market trends, your clients and moreover, about the status of your own business. Hence, there is a lot of demand for data entry services in order to do great business.

As you must be aware of the fact that data entry services can be time consuming; hence it requires efficient workforce to execute various tasks perfectly and diligently. Every transaction has to be recorded, processed and analyzed so that the management or the decision-makers can have a clear picture of the actual financial standing of the company. In fact, there are many organizations that are interested in the data of company so that they can strike a business deal with the company in the future; the competitors are also the one's who are constantly following the happenings of the company. However, the most important part that constitutes group are the shareholders, employees, creditors, consumers and the market in general. Therefore, this service plays a significant role in determining the future of the company. Thus, it is taken very seriously by many business enterprises for various reasons that can elevate their businesses by many fractions.

In fact, data entry services are now being outsourced from various leading vendors to further simplify the requirements of every business. Well, these services cover many business activities like document and image processing, data conversion, image enhancement, image editing, catalog processing, and photo manipulation. In fact, you can use data entry services for transferring hard or soft copy to any database format; insurance claims entry; PDF document indexing; online data capture; product catalogs to web based systems; online order entry and follow up; creation of new databases. Moreover, banks, airlines, government agencies, direct marketing services and service providers are using these services for better businesses.

The data services are also utilized for mailing lists; data mining and warehousing; data cleansing; audio transcriptions; legal documents; indexing of vouchers and documents; hand written ballot or card entry; online completion of surveys and responses of customers for various companies. Now its up to the company to whether go for a vendor or hire in-house staff to accomplish tasks in a better way; the main purpose of this service is to offer convenience that can help in curbing time as well as other resources.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Elevate-Your-Business-With-Data-Entry-Services&id=777230

Internet Data Mining - How Does it Help Businesses?

Internet has become an indispensable medium for people to conduct different types of businesses and transactions too. This has given rise to the employment of different internet data mining tools and strategies so that they could better their main purpose of existence on the internet platform and also increase their customer base manifold.

Internet data-mining encompasses various processes of collecting and summarizing different data from various websites or webpage contents or make use of different login procedures so that they could identify various patterns. With the help of internet data-mining it becomes extremely easy to spot a potential competitor, pep up the customer support service on the website and make it more customers oriented.

There are different types of internet data_mining techniques which include content, usage and structure mining. Content mining focuses more on the subject matter that is present on a website which includes the video, audio, images and text. Usage mining focuses on a process where the servers report the aspects accessed by users through the server access logs. This data helps in creating an effective and an efficient website structure. Structure mining focuses on the nature of connection of the websites. This is effective in finding out the similarities between various websites.

Also known as web data_mining, with the aid of the tools and the techniques, one can predict the potential growth in a selective market regarding a specific product. Data gathering has never been so easy and one could make use of a variety of tools to gather data and that too in simpler methods. With the help of the data mining tools, screen scraping, web harvesting and web crawling have become very easy and requisite data can be put readily into a usable style and format. Gathering data from anywhere in the web has become as simple as saying 1-2-3. Internet data-mining tools therefore are effective predictors of the future trends that the business might take.

If you are interested to know something more on Web Data Mining and other details, you are welcome to the Screen Scraping Technology site.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Internet-Data-Mining---How-Does-it-Help-Businesses?&id=3860679