Web scraping techniques automatically open a new world for researchers by automatically extracting structured datasets from readable web content. A web scraper accesses web pages, finds the data items specified on the page, extracts them, transforms them into different formats if necessary, and finally saves this data as a structured dataset.
This can be described as pretending to know how a web browser works by accessing web pages and saving them to a computer's hard disk cache. Researchers use this content for analysis after cleaning and organizing data.
A web scraper reverses the process of manually gathering data from many web pages and putting together structured datasets from complex, unstructured text that ...
