Anyone knows an online tool that can scrape a page and create a REST API for the scraped data?

I'm looking for a SaaS solution that is able to login to a platform, scrape data (reports) and then allow accessing the

data through an API. I have some reporting platforms that provide web reporting and email reporting but with no API.

Online reporting doesn't help and email reporting, although can be automated and scraped, isn't so reliable.

If you are willing to do the scraping through your own connection, have a look at Import IO. They have a desktop

application that you use to teach the system how to scrape a page, and then you run the crawler from that application -

and you can run it for as long as you like, as far as I can tell.

You may then upload your data to the Import cloud, from where it is available via an API on the import.io servers.

Useful data can be made public to donate it "to the commons" if you wish.


I did some more digging, found iMacros as a possible solution. Its Windows based, which is a drawback in my case, but

it does allow automation of the scraping and afterwards interaction via common web scripting languages like PHP and

ASP.net.


If you are familiar with jQuery, I think you can use node.js and Cheerio module, then you can create a simple

application to do auto scraping. Actually I have already built a site to do on line web scraping based on the above

mentioned tech, the site is www.datafiddle.net, you can take a look at it.


Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19646028/anyone-knows-an-online-tool-that-can-scrape-a-page-and-create-a-

rest-api-for-the

Scrapy, scraping price data from StubHub

I've been having a difficult time with this one.

I want to scrape all the prices listed for this Bruno Mars concert at the Hollywood Bowl so I can get the average price.

http://www.stubhub.com/bruno-mars-tickets/bruno-mars-hollywood-hollywood-bowl-31-5-2014-4449604/

I've located the prices in the HTML and the xpath is pretty straightforward but I cannot get any values to return.

I think it has something to do with the content being generated via javascript or ajax but I can't figure out how to send the correct request to get the code to work.

Here's what I have:

from scrapy.spider import BaseSpider
from scrapy.selector import Selector

from deeptix.items import DeeptixItem

class TicketSpider(BaseSpider):
    name = "deeptix"
    allowed_domains = ["stubhub.com"]
    start_urls = ["http://www.stubhub.com/bruno-mars-tickets/bruno-mars-hollywood-hollywood-bowl-31-5-2014-4449604/"]

def parse(self, response):
    sel = Selector(response)
    sites = sel.xpath('//div[contains(@class, "q_cont")]')
    items = []
    for site in sites:
        item = DeeptixItem()
        item['price'] = site.xpath('span[contains(@class, "q")]/text()').extract()
        items.append(item)
    return items

Any help would be greatly appreciated I've been struggling with this one for quite some time now. Thank you in advance!


Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22770917/scrapy-scraping-price-data-from-stubhub

using Perl to scrape a website

I am interested in writing a perl script that goes to the following link and extracts the number 1975: https://familysearch.org/search/collection/results#count=20&query=%2Bevent_place_level_1%3ACalifornia%20%2Bevent_place_level_2%3A%22San%20Diego%22%20%2Bbirth_year%3A1923-1923~%20%2Bgender%3AM%20%2Brace%3AWhite&collection_id=2000219

That website is the amount of white men born in the year 1923 who live in San Diego County, California in 1940. I am trying to do this in a loop structure to generalize over multiple counties and birth years.

In the file, locations.txt, I put the list of counties, such as San Diego County.

The current code runs, but instead of the # 1975, it displays unknown. The number 1975 should be in $val\n.

I would very much appreciate any help!

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

use LWP::Simple;

open(L, "locations26.txt");

my $url = 'https://familysearch.org/search/collection/results#count=20&query=%2Bevent_place_level_1%3A%22California%22%20%2Bevent_place_level_2%3A%22%LOCATION%%22%20%2Bbirth_year%3A%YEAR%-%YEAR%~%20%2Bgender%3AM%20%2Brace%3AWhite&collection_id=2000219';

open(O, ">out26.txt");
 my $oldh = select(O);
 $| = 1;
 select($oldh);
 while (my $location = <L>) {
     chomp($location);
     $location =~ s/ /+/g;
      foreach my $year (1923..1923) {
                 my $u = $url;
                 $u =~ s/%LOCATION%/$location/;
                 $u =~ s/%YEAR%/$year/;
                 #print "$u\n";
                 my $content = get($u);
                 my $val = 'unknown';
                 if ($content =~ / of .strong.([0-9,]+)..strong. /) {
                         $val = $1;
                 }
                 $val =~ s/,//g;
                 $location =~ s/\+/ /g;
                 print "'$location',$year,$val\n";
                 print O "'$location',$year,$val\n";
         }
     }

Update: API is not a viable solution. I have been in contact with the site developer. The API does not apply to that part of the webpage. Hence, any solution pertaining to JSON will not be applicbale.



Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14654288/using-perl-to-scrape-a-website

Data Scraping using php

Here is my code

    $ip=$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];

    $url=file_get_contents("http://whatismyipaddress.com/ip/$ip");

    preg_match_all('/<th>(.*?)<\/th><td>(.*?)<\/td>/s',$url,$output,PREG_SET_ORDER);

    $isp=$output[1][2];

    $city=$output[9][2];

    $state=$output[8][2];

    $zipcode=$output[12][2];

    $country=$output[7][2];

    ?>
    <body>
    <table align="center">
    <tr><td>ISP :</td><td><?php echo $isp;?></td></tr>
    <tr><td>City :</td><td><?php echo $city;?></td></tr>
    <tr><td>State :</td><td><?php echo $state;?></td></tr>
    <tr><td>Zipcode :</td><td><?php echo $zipcode;?></td></tr>
    <tr><td>Country :</td><td><?php echo $country;?></td></tr>
    </table>
    </body>

How do I find out the ISP provider of a person viewing a PHP page?

Is it possible to use PHP to track or reveal it?

Error: http://i.imgur.com/LGWI8.png

Curl Scrapping

<?php
$curl_handle=curl_init();
curl_setopt( $curl_handle, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true );
$url='http://www.whatismyipaddress.com/ip/132.123.23.23';
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, Array("User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.15) Gecko/20080623 Firefox/2.0.0.15") );
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Your application name');
$query = curl_exec($curl_handle);

curl_close($curl_handle);
preg_match_all('/<th>(.*?)<\/th><td>(.*?)<\/td>/s',$url,$output,PREG_SET_ORDER);
echo $query;
$isp=$output[1][2];

$city=$output[9][2];

$state=$output[8][2];

$zipcode=$output[12][2];

$country=$output[7][2];
?>
<body>
<table align="center">
<tr><td>ISP :</td><td><?php echo $isp;?></td></tr>
<tr><td>City :</td><td><?php echo $city;?></td></tr>
<tr><td>State :</td><td><?php echo $state;?></td></tr>
<tr><td>Zipcode :</td><td><?php echo $zipcode;?></td></tr>
<tr><td>Country :</td><td><?php echo $country;?></td></tr>
</table>
</body>

Error: http://i.imgur.com/FJIq6.png

What's is wrong with my code here? Any alternative code , that i can use here.

I am not able to scrape that data as described here. http://i.imgur.com/FJIq6.png

P.S. Please post full code. It would be easier for me to understand.



Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10461088/data-scraping-using-php

PDF scraping using R

I have been using the XML package successfully for extracting HTML tables but want to extend to PDF's. From previous questions it does not appear that there is a simple R solution but wondered if there had been any recent developments

Failing that, is there some way in Python (in which I am a complete Novice) to obtain and manipulate pdfs so that I could finish the job off with the R XML package

Extracting text from PDFs is hard, and nearly always requires lots of care.

I'd start with the command line tools such as pdftotext and see what they spit out. The problem is that PDFs can store the text in any order, can use awkward font encodings, and can do things like use ligature characters (the joined up 'ff' and 'ij' that you see in proper typesetting) to throw you.

pdftotext is installable on any Linux system



Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7918718/pdf-scraping-using-r

Obtaining reddit data

I am interested in obtaining data from different reddit subreddits. Does anyone know

if there is a reddit/other api similar like twitter does to crawl all the pages?


Yes, reddit has an API that can be used for a variety of purposes such as data

collection, automatic commenting bots, or even to assist in subreddit moderation.

There are a few places to discover information on reddit's API:

    github reddit wiki -- provides the overview and rules for using reddit's API

(follow the rules)
    automatically generated API docs -- provides information on the requests needed to

access most of the API endpoints
    /r/redditdev -- the reddit community dedicated to answering questions both about

reddit's source code and about reddit's API

If there is a particular programming language you are already familiar with, you

should check out the existing set of API wrappers for various languages. Despite my

bias (I am the package maintainer) I am quite certain PRAW, for python, has support

for the largest number of reddit API features.



Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14322834/obtaining-reddit-data

Web Scraping data from different sites

I am looking for a few ideas on how can I solve a design problem I'm going to be faced with building a web scraper to scrape multiple sites. Writing the scraper(s) is not the problem, matching the data from different sites (which may have small differences) is.

For the sake of being generic assume that I am scraping something like this from two or more different sites:

    public class Data {
        public int id;
        public String firstname;
        public String surname;
        ....
    }

If i scrape this from two different sites, I will encounter the situation where I could have the following:

Site A: id=100, firstname=William, surname=Doe

Site B: id=1974, firstname=Bill, surname=Doe

Essentially, I would like to consider these two sets of data the same (they are the same person but with their name slightly different on each site). I am looking for possible design solutions that can handle this.

The only idea I've come up with is scraping the data from a third location and using it as a reference list. Then when I scrape site A or B I can, over time, build up a list of failures and store them in a list for each scraper so that it can know (if i find id=100 then i know that the firstname will be William etc). I can't help but feel this is a rubbish idea!

If you need any more info, or if you think my description is a bit naff, let me know!

Thanks,

DMcB


Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23970057/web-scraping-data-from-different-sites