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Web Scraping
Learn Web Scraping with Node.js and ScrapingAnt in 5 Minutes
How to collect data and automate your tasks with JavaScript
JavaScript is a popular and widely used language that we can leverage along with its runtime Node.js as a tool to crawl the web, collect data, and automate our lives or grow a business.
In today’s post, I’ll break down how to efficiently web scrape public data using JavaScript and as a case study, I’ll perform the scenario of extracting the list of Top Writers (or bloggers) on this platform along with the number of their followers. This practice has many benefits, such as opting for influencers' marketing as a digital marketing strategy.
“Data scraping or web scraping is a form of extracting information from a website or app (a human-readable output) and saving it in a spreadsheet or local file. This technique is not illegal, but its purpose and how it is applied can be.”
— What Is Data Scraping?
After reading this post will have a functional understanding of how to create and run a Node.js project (If you don’t have it yet), and how to use a library to scrape the web.
So, without further ado, let’s get started.
Why ScrapingAnt?
As a web scraper, you are carrying out challenging tasks. You need, for example, to make sure that your requests will not get blocked by the target site.
But the good news is that you don’t need to do this by yourself. There are tools in the market that provide the required infrastructure and techniques to achieve your endeavors. By using a web scraping tool, you will benefit from features like:
- Bypass CAPTCHA
- Automatic IP rotation to prevent IP from being blocked.
- JavaScript Rendering
- Export of the extracted data to JSON, text file, HTML, CSV, etc.
ScrapingAnt is a scraping tool that offers the following advantages:
- A Web Scraping API that runs a…
