The web scraping task can be tedious and time-consuming due to the involvement of code. Researchers introduced new web scraping tools like Octoparse that can easily extract information without the knowledge of coding skills. It gives a click function for the users to develop extraction patterns.
The tool reproduces human activity to communicate with web pages. To make information extraction easier, Octoparse highlights rounding out forms, entering a search term in the content. The extracted information can be stored in the form of HTML, CSV, Excel and TXT format.
Here we will cover the detailed explanation of the working of Octoparse to extract data from a particular website.
Let’s get started.
Go to the WebPage
Visit the Octoparse website page. Let’s create an account by entering all the details on the webpage.
Octoparse offers two modes for data extraction. Advanced mode is adaptable to most of the websites. Task templates give pre-built template tasks for a lot of websites like Amazon, Instagram, Facebook etc. In this project, we will use the Advanced mode option.
After clicking the advanced mode option enter the target URL from where we want to extract information.
Octoparse tool will load the target page which is provided in the Extraction URL tab.
Let’s switch on the workflow mode for a better view.
Creating a Pagination Loop
As there is a need to collect information from multiple pages in the website we need to create a pagination loop. Click on the Next button at the bottom of the webpage. Loop click next page option will appear. Select that option so that it will create a pagination loop until it reaches the last page.
Creating a loop item
In this step, we need to select an auto part option as given below. This will turn into a green highlight and other options will turn red. “Select all” option is clicked so that all the items whose information needs to be extracted will get selected.
The workflow will appear like:
Select the data to extract
Click the name of the auto shop, its address and contact information. Select data from the action menu. Finally, select the visit website option and then click the “extract the URL of the selected link” button to get the information. Now, we are ready with extracted information.
The extracted information will be saved as below:
The final workflow will appear as below:
Run the Task
In the final step, we need to run the task either on a local environment or cloud. The information can be extracted into Excel or CSV file.
Final Thoughts
In this article, we have discussed the details of Octoparse tool that requires no coding environment. Further, we have used this tool to extract information from a particular website. It is a much easier task for both experienced and inexperienced programmers to get information using Octoparse.
