Let’s go to ScraperAPI’s blog, right-click and hit on inspect. The most common one is by inspecting the site with the browser’s developer tool. There are several ways to find the right property we need to target when building a parser with CSS.
How to Inspect a Page to Pick the Right CSS Selector However, before we can do that, we’ll need to understand the structure of our target website to find the right target. Then, we build a parser using CSS to filter the HTML and only pick the elements we need.īuilding a parser using CSS can be really powerful as we can use a single line of code to retrieve a specific set of elements.įor example, we can target a listing of products and extract product names, descriptions, and prices, and fill a spreadsheet with all these data for further analysis.As a response, the server will send it the HTML source code. First, we make our script send a request to the server.It uses selectors to pick HTML elements based on classes, IDs, attributes and pseudo-classes and then apply styles on to it, telling the browser how to display the element on a visual level.īy using the same logic, we can use CSS selectors to tell our scraper where to find the data we want it to collect. Otherwise, let’s explore the basics of CSS and how we can use it for web scraping.Īlongside HTML and JavaScript, CSS is one of the building blocks of any website and web application. If you’re already familiar with cascading style sheets (CSS), you can move to the next section. In other words, every web scraper needs a parser, and there’s no easier way to build one than using CSS selectors. The last thing we need is for our scraper to return huge amounts of unnecessary data, adding noise we then need to clean.
Whether it is to analyze trends, create a database of content for marketing purposes, build a repository with real estate listings, etc. There are specific data points we want to collect in order to accomplish whatever we’re trying to achieve. When creating a web scraper we always have a goal in mind.