Knowing how to scrape a website can be a handy skill: you can easily access public information and create one file with it. Compare that to countless hours if you would have to collect that data manually. Start this web scraping tutorial to learn how to use Node.JS and Selenium to scrape not only the web but also automate the scraping.
How do you extract data?
To carry out Node.JS and Selenium web scraping, you will need to write a code that will help to extract the required data. This scraper takes the specified URL, parses the HTML DOM, and returns the result that you can save in a CSV file. You can use this web scraping tutorial technique to parse textual or graphic information:
- Texts;
- Images;
- Prices;
- Contact information;
- Videos.
Once you learn how to scrape a website, you can achieve a big step in data science, as data mining is a big part of this field.
Beginner-friendly Web Scraping Tutorial
To join this Selenium and Node.JS web scraping course, you only need to have the basics of HTML and JavaScript. Everything else will be explained while you learn theory and do practical projects.
In this tutorial, we will be using Node.JS because it is lightweight, efficient, and easy to scale. Moreover, this runtime is asynchronous, so you will not have to wait for requests to complete before you start a new one. This means you can run multiple requests at the same time. Lastly, it is easy to understand it (especially if you know HTML/JavaScript basics) and how to scrape a website using it.
We will also use Selenium for web scraping automation. This tool is quite popular as it is free and open-source; it supports many programming languages and operating systems; it is supported across many browsers. We will be using mostly because this tool is easy to implement and use/reuse.
The web scraping tutorial consists of two parts: theoretical and practical. In the theoretical part, you will learn:
- How to set up the coding environment to prepare for Node.JS and Selenium web scraping;
- What the building blocks and Selenium and Node.JS web scraping are.
In the practical part of this course, you will adequately learn how to scrape a website from three projects:
- You will do a translation automation project for Google Translate 2018;
- You will change the plan to accustom the scraping to Google Translate 2019;
- I will show you how to scrape a travel insurance website.
From both of these parts, you will get valuable knowledge and skills such as:
- How to make your scraper read data from a CSV file;
- How to store the scraped data in a new CSV file;
- How to apply various validations to your code;
- How to make your scraper interact with HTML DOM;
- How to write XPATH;
- How to use Node.JS and Selenium.
The course is full of practical lessons to advance your skills. Join this web scraping tutorial and make your first steps into data mining. Enroll today!
