{"id":86811,"date":"2021-03-10T18:22:11","date_gmt":"2021-03-10T12:52:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/data-flair.training\/blogs\/?p=86811"},"modified":"2021-03-10T18:22:11","modified_gmt":"2021-03-10T12:52:11","slug":"automated-web-scraping-with-java","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/data-flair.training\/blogs\/automated-web-scraping-with-java\/","title":{"rendered":"Automated Web Scraping with Java"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s a common strategy in any business industry to check out your competition. Investigating your direct competitors is a great way to price your goods, figure out what your customers are looking for, and even get clues on your rivals\u2019 business strategies.<\/p>\n

However, while standard web scraping is easy to do for just one website, things get complicated if you need to research hundreds of thousands of them.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s where automated web scraping with Java comes in. Java technology is the base for many types of automated web scraping, but several different Java-based web scraping tools are available on the web that all work slightly differently.<\/p>\n

In this article, we\u2019ll walk you through how automated web scraping works, as well as several of the best web scraping tools available today.<\/p>\n

A Quick Introduction to Automated Web Scraping<\/h3>\n

Essentially, automated web scraping is the process by which a program isolates and compiles data from one or more websites without your intervention. One type of web scraping involves downloading the HTML of the web page in question, then searching that data for the variables you\u2019re looking for. Your program may or may not compile the results for you after, depending on its functionality.<\/p>\n

If you wanted to, you could easily go to a website, find the material you wanted, copy and paste it into your own dataset, and then move on with your project. Java (and other coding languages that we don\u2019t cover here) can automate this process for you.<\/p>\n

However, you need an interface that can handle the scraping process for you to do this. Java is just the code you use to tell the program what to do.<\/p>\n

The advantages to automating the web scraping process like this are numerous. For one, a program can scrape websites more quickly than you ever could by hand. With a little extra coding knowledge, you can have your program automatically compile the results into easy-to-read datasets, too.<\/p>\n

While a web scraping program will take a bit of extra time to set up initially, that time invested will pay for itself in effort over time. For example, you can easily tweak the final program to look for different data or multiple data types once you finish.<\/p>\n

Web Scraping Tools<\/h2>\n

While you always have the option of building your own scraper tool, novice coders and programmers will find it helpful to use one of the many free web scraping tools available online. However, keep in mind that, at least as far as Java goes, there is no single \u201cperfect\u201d web scraping tool out there. Each has benefits and drawbacks, so make sure to pick the one that works best for what you need to do.<\/p>\n

JSoup<\/h3>\n

JSoup is one of the most popular Java web scraping tools. It is entirely open source, meaning JSoup and its documentation are free to download and use. Jsoup is popular among users for two main reasons:<\/p>\n