April 17, 2019
Configure Chrome, Firefox and Edge for Web Automation Unlike with IE, WinAutomation uses extensions to communicate with Chrome, Firefox and Edge. These addons are normally included in the WinAutomation installation, during which the user will be prompted to install them. Auto Refresh Web Page Web Browser Extension. That are web browser extensions to auto reload a web page however a bookmarklet script, like the one above, is better because it works in and and all browsers where extensions only work with the particular web browser they are written for. We will scrape HTML from any web page using jQuery and firefox firebug console. This is useful when you want to grab HTML of web page dynamically created.
Scraping websites content on demand. Our Web Scraping API and Tools are built for everyone, from data scientist to a developer. Start crawling and scraping websites in minutes thanks to our APIs created to open your doors to internet data freedom. We offer web scraping APIs for developers & web scraper for chrome & firefox for Non-Developers. Go to the add-ons page (extensions) of the Mozilla Firefox browser. Open the settings menu by clicking on the corresponding icon. Select the menu item 'install addon from file' in the drop-down list. Select the file with the plugin 'web-scraper-chrome-extension-v.zip' provided on the disk with the distribution package of the program.
Sitemap.xml, Release
We are happy to announce that Web Scraper 0.4.0 has been released. This release contains a new selector, updates to other selectors and improved CSS selector generator. Skidata laptops & desktops driver download. Starting from version 0.4.0 Web Scraper is also available in Firefox.
Sitemap.xml link selector
Many websites want to be crawled by scrapers. For example, news outlets want their articles to appear in search engine results. In order for this to happen, a search engine has to crawl the entire site. The site can make this work more efficient by listing all of the relevant URLs in a sitemap.xml file. This makes the job for a crawler more efficient and also ensures that everything within the site is being indexed.
With Sitemap.xml Link selector you can leverage this feature to access all of the relevant URLs in a site without having to build a path through the site using the Link selectors for navigation and pagination. With a single selector you can access every product page in an e-commerce site. It is always worth checking out whether the site has sitemap.xml files before creating other selectors, as using this method can speed up the scraper configuration significantly.
When using the Sitemap.xml Link selector use the Add from robots.txt button to automatically discover sitemap.xml links. If no links are discovered you can conduct a manual check whether a example.com/sitemap.xml page exists. Add child selectors under the Sitemap.xml Link selector that extract data from URLs that the sitemap.xml file leads to.
Element click selector
With this release it is now possible to add an Element Click Selector under another Element Click Selector. With this feature you can go through multiple product color/size variations within a single product page to get the SKU and the price for every variation.
You can also now use element click selector to click through options within a <select> element.
Element scroll down selector
Element scroll down selector now scrolls down with a smooth animation. It will additionally try a few tricks to trigger the data load event within the website. Generally the Element scroll down selector isn't as reliable as Link selectors but with this update it should also work in some additional edge cases.
Firefox
I'll start by saying big thanks to Firefox team. They have done a lot work in order to bring the Web Extensions API into their browser. The most painful part of this probably was that they had to remove their previous add-on API with all of the add-ons that developers had been building for years. Despite this, this was a good choice that they made. The Web Extensions API is compatible with other browser and removes the overhead of developing the same solution for different platforms.
You can download Firefox version of Web Scraper here. If the Firefox version isn't behaving as expected please let us know by posting a bug report in Web Scraper Forum.
CSS Selector generator
When you are selecting an element within a page, Web Scraper generates a CSS selector. In this release we made some improvements to the CSS Selector generator. When generating a CSS Selector the generator will additionally try to use element attributes and their values. Additionally it will generate better CSS selectors for description lists using the :contains() selector. We made some additional tweaks to reduce the use of order based selector :nth-of-type() which frequently doesn't work well across multiple pages.
Here is a list of tips and advice on using Firefox for scraping, along with alist of useful Firefox add-ons to ease the scraping process.
Caveats with inspecting the live browser DOM¶
Since Firefox add-ons operate on a live browser DOM, what you’ll actually seewhen inspecting the page source is not the original HTML, but a modified oneafter applying some browser clean up and executing Javascript code. Firefox,in particular, is known for adding <tbody> elements to tables. Scrapy, onthe other hand, does not modify the original page HTML, so you won’t be able toextract any data if you use <tbody> in your XPath expressions.
Therefore, you should keep in mind the following things when working withFirefox and XPath:
- Disable Firefox Javascript while inspecting the DOM looking for XPaths to beused in Scrapy
- Never use full XPath paths, use relative and clever ones based on attributes(such as
id,class,width, etc) or any identifying features likecontains(@href,'image'). - Never include
<tbody>elements in your XPath expressions unless youreally know what you’re doing
Useful Firefox add-ons for scraping¶
Firebug¶
Firebug is a widely known tool among web developers and it’s also veryuseful for scraping. In particular, its Inspect Element feature comes veryhandy when you need to construct the XPaths for extracting data because itallows you to view the HTML code of each page element while moving your mouseover it.
See Using Firebug for scraping for a detailed guide on how to use Firebug withScrapy.
XPather¶
Top Firefox Extensions
XPather allows you to test XPath expressions directly on the pages.
XPath Checker¶
Web Scraper Extension Firefox Download
XPath Checker is another Firefox add-on for testing XPaths on your pages.
Tamper Data¶
Tamper Data is a Firefox add-on which allows you to view and modify the HTTPrequest headers sent by Firefox. Firebug also allows to view HTTP headers, butnot to modify them.
Firecookie¶
Firefox Web Store Extensions
Firecookie makes it easier to view and manage cookies. You can use thisextension to create a new cookie, delete existing cookies, see a list of cookiesfor the current site, manage cookies permissions and a lot more.