What is web scraping?
Web scraping , also known as web data extraction, is the process of retrieving or “scraping” data from a website. Data displayed by most websites can only be viewed using a web browser. Most websites do not provide the option to save the data which they display to your local storage, or to your own website. This is where a Web Scraping software like ScrapingAnt comes in handy. Web scraping is the technique of automating this process so that instead of manually copying the data from websites, web scraping software performs action by a predefined algorithm. Unlike screen scraping, which only copies pixels displayed onscreen, web scraping extracts underlying HTML code and, with it, data stored in a database. In a non-automation world this kind of data retrieving can be performed as a common text copy-pasting action. A web scraping software can automatically load, extract, and process any type of data from multiple pages of websites based on your needs. It is either custom-built f...