Now-a-days, a number of people are relying on the internet for all kinds of information like any kind of product price, market information, weather forecast, job posting, competitors detail and many more. We can get all kinds of data from internet but the main thing we have to do is visit different websites.
Different websites contain same type of data but they are present in different styles. If you are searching for some information on a particular topic, then you will have to browse through the search engine. Thereafter, read the data on website then copy and paste it into another document. This type of manual data extraction process is quite time-consuming as well as inefficient.
We can capture plenty of data using a special and trendy process called Data Scraping.
Nowadays many Web data Scraping software programs are available on the internet but you need some custom web scraping tools or applications that not only scrap data from websites from the targeted websites but also scrap other online materials like product images, text files, PDF files, videos, mp3 audios, etc.
In Data Scraping, we scrap data from websites. Data Scraping is also known as web scraping. The main task for Data Scraping is transforming unstructured website content into structured data and after that store in various databases or spreadsheets.
As we scrap data form websites, this is done automatically but for that, we have to write data scraping script in variety of languages like PHP, ASP, Python, .Net, Perl, Java, etc. Using this scraping script, we can scrap unstructured or semi-structured web data from the targeted websites and then converting that row data into structured data called records.
For particular websites, web scraping script go through all the web pages and scraping out data like Information for different produces, price details, some contact information etc. This is generally used for scraping real estate data, stock quotes, mortgage rates, and any other data.
In short, Web Data Scraping is the process in which we are scraping data from the HTML web pages and put them in proper formatted databases like My-SQL, MS-SQL, excel spreadsheet, MS- access XML or any other databases.