Web Scraping, Web Harvesting, or Web Data Extraction means gathering selective data or information across the web. Nowadays, startups and freelancing businesses who want to start domain-specific projects target data collecting. 

Suppose you want to buy a product; the first thing you will do is find the product’s price on an eCommerce website. It looks easy, but what when you need to do this exercise for thousands of products across various eCommerce websites? Here comes the web scraping role. 

Let’s dive deeper and learn this amazing technique from scratch. 

Before You Begin 

Planning your track is crucial before you start with the process. The process is divided into two parts, these are: 

  • Fetching data using a headless browser and request libraries.
  • Extracting the required data from the available data source through Parsing. 

Now, check out some prerequisites you need : 

  1. Node.js (preferably the latest LTS version) NPM node running on your machine
  2. NPM modules installed and running
  3. . A basic understanding of Web Scraping, CSS selectors, or Xpath will be helpful.

Without further ado, let’s get started.

Steps to Web Scraping using Javascript and NodeJs

Ensure your NodeJs are successfully installed. In this process, you will use cheerio and node-fetch packages for web scraping using JavaScript. To work with any third-party package, you must set up the project with the npm first.

Here’s how to complete the setup: 

  • First, create a “web_scraping” directory and then navigate to it.
  • After directory creation, run the “npm init” command for project initialization.
  • As per your preference, answer the question asked during creation.
  • Lastly, use the “npm install node-fetch cheerio” command to install the packages. 

Two packages, cheerio and node-fetch are highly used and best for web scraping in JavaScript.

  • node-fetch

The node-fetch plays the most crucial part by bringing the window.fetch to the NodeJs environment. node-fetch helps to get the real data set by making the HTTP requests. 

  • cheerio

The cheerio package extracts and parses the required information that is necessary from the available raw data.

For example, extract all cricket world cup winners and runner-ups from the data list available

Advantages Of Web Scraping Solutions

Web Scraping plays a pivotal role in achieving success and developing the business, mostly when you are starting from scratch. Here are some Web scraping advantages and processes :

  • Save Cost

Web Scraping saves cost and time by reducing the time involved in the data extraction task. Once created, these tools can be put into automation.

  • Result Accuracy 

Web Scraping cab easily beats human data collection as beacuse it uses an automated scraping technique. 

  • Time To Market Advantage

Quick and accurate results help businesses save time, money, and human labor, leading to an apparent time-to-market advantage over competitors.

  • High Quality

Web Scraping provides access to clean, well-structured, and high-quality data through scraping APIs to integrate fresh new data into the systems.

Conclusion 

That’s about how to scrape web pages with Node.js and JavaScript to render meaningful HTML. Well, there’s a smart way to make this process simple and quick. You can refer to Relu Consultancy to perform data scraping in no time. At Relu Consultancy, a team of engineers and data scientists will build the best and most accurate data-scraping solution as per your need to help your business grow exponentially. 

Furthermore, with Relu Consultancy, you will also get- 

  • Efficient data scraping services with cutting-edge technology, 
  • Flexible scraping process to serve with scalable,
  • Secure and outcome-driven solutions.

Leave a Comment