Complete Web Scraping Guide
Master web scraping and data extraction with our comprehensive guide. Learn about image scraping, content extraction, legal considerations, and best practices for data collection.
Image Extraction
Extract all images from websites including photos, graphics, and icons.
Text & Content
Extract clean text content, articles, and structured data from web pages.
Social Media Data
Extract content from social media platforms and user profiles.
E-commerce Data
Extract product information, prices, and details from online stores.
Browser Automation
Puppeteer/Playwright
Control headless browsers for dynamic content and JavaScript-heavy sites
Selenium
Cross-browser automation for complex interactions and form submissions
HTTP Requests
API Endpoints
Direct API calls for structured data (preferred method)
HTML Parsing
Parse static HTML content using libraries like BeautifulSoup or Cheerio
Anti-Detection Techniques
// Rotate user agents const userAgents = [ 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36' ]; // Add delays between requests await new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, 1000 + Math.random() * 2000)); // Use proxy rotation const proxy = proxies[Math.floor(Math.random() * proxies.length)];
Legal Guidelines
- Always check robots.txt file before scraping
- Respect rate limits and don't overload servers
- Don't scrape copyrighted content without permission
- Follow website terms of service
Ethical Best Practices
- Use data responsibly and don't violate privacy
- Give proper attribution when required
- Consider the impact on website performance
- Be transparent about data collection purposes