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What are some top screen scraper software you can recommend? Here's my criteria: it can be easily be configured, can export in a variety of formats (CSV,SQL,text, etc). I need to get data from webpages, the data I'm planning to get are prices, descriptions and some images and that data can then be exported in different formats.

Do you guys know a software that does that?

Thanks!

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There's a free version of Scrape.it Screen Scraper, you can define rules in a tree like format and the workflow is very easy to get a scraping job up and running very fast.

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This is good. thanks! – Pennf0lio Dec 18 '11 at 20:25
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Screen Scraping Software for Webpages

An excellent freeware application with a friendly graphical interface is DEiXTo: http://deixto.com/ It offers a wealth of options for extracting webpage content and saving it as XML and tab-delimited files.

Other free and commercial software products are covered by KDnuggets, billed as the data mining community's top resource: http://www.kdnuggets.com/software/web-content-mining.html

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DEiXTo (or ΔEiXTo) is a powerful web data extraction tool that is based on the W3C Document Object Model (DOM). It allows users to create highly accurate "extraction rules" (wrappers) that describe what pieces of data to scrape from a website. DEiXTo consists of three separate components:

  • GUI DEiXTo, an MS Windows™ application implementing a friendly graphical user interface that is used to manage extraction rules (build, test, fine-tune, save and modify). Command Line Executor, a stand-alone, cross-platform utility that can massively apply an extraction rule on multiple target HTML pages and produce structured output in a wide variety of formats.
  • DEiXToBot, a Perl module implementing a flexible and efficient sleepy Mechanize agent (essentially a browser emulator) capable of extracting data of interest using GUI DEiXTo generated patterns. It contains best of breed Perl technology and allows extensive customization. Thus, it facilitates tailor-made solutions.
  • DEiXTo can contend with a wide range of websites with high precision and recall. It provides the user with an arsenal of features aiming at the construction of well-engineered extraction rules. Wrappers built with GUI DEiXTo can be scheduled to run automatically providing automated access to resources of interest and saving users a lot of time, energy and repetitive effort.

What is more, DEiXTo has been working very well for quite some time with large and complex systems such as:

  • openarchives.gr - Greek Digital Libraries Search Engine
  • aggregator.libver.gr - Hellenic Aggregator for Europeana
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I advise : Helium Scrapper http://www.heliumscraper.com/

Other softwares : http://www.kdnuggets.com/software/web-content-mining.html http://www.fminer.com/forum/topic/2/ http://pclou.dyndns.org:56180/index.php/archives/222 http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Databases/Data_Mining/Tool_Vendors/ Not very user friendly IMHO but very powerful : Rapid Miner http://rapid-i.com/

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WWW::Mechanize is useful for HTML-scraping

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