You’ve found the data on the web, but download option is not available and copy-paste has failed you. Get data from web-based APIs, such as interfaces provided by online databases and many modern web applications (including Twitter, Facebook and many others).įear not, there may still be a way to get the data out. This is a fantastic way to access government or commercial data, as well as data from social media sites.Ģ. This is very difficult, as PDF is a language for printers and does not retain much information on the structure of the data that is displayed within a document. Extracting information from PDFs is beyond the scope of this book, but there are some tools and tutorials that may help you do it.ģ.
During screen scraping, you’re extracting structured content from a normal web page with the help of a scraping utility or by writing a small piece of code. While this method is very powerful and can be used in many places, it requires a bit of understanding about how the web works. With all those great technical options, don’t forget the simple options: often it is worth to spend some time searching for a file with machine-readable data or to call the institution which is holding the data you want. Everyone has done this: you go to a website, see an interesting table and try to copy it over to Excel so you can add some numbers up or store it for later. Yet this often does not really work, or the information you want is spread across a large number of web sites. Copying by hand can quickly become very tedious, so it makes sense to use a bit of code to do it. The advantage of scraping is that you can do it with virtually any web site - from weather forecasts to government spending, even if that site does not have an API for raw data access. Web scrapers are usually small pieces of code written in a programming language such as Python, Ruby or PHP. Choosing the right language is largely a question of which community you have access to: if there is someone in your newsroom or city already working with one of these languages, then it makes sense to adopt the same language.
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