Data Mining Explained

Overview

Data mining is the crucial process of extracting implicit and possibly useful information from data. It uses analytical and visualization techniques to explore and present information in a format which is easily understandable by humans.

Data mining is widely used in a variety of profiling practices, such as fraud detection, marketing research, surveys and scientific discovery.

In this article I will briefly explain some of the fundamentals and its applications in the real world.

Herein I will not discuss related processes of any sorts, including Data Extraction and Data Structuring.

The Effort

Data Mining has found its application in various fields such as financial institutions, health-care & bio-informatics, business intelligence, social networks data research and many more.

Businesses use it to understand consumer behavior, analyze buying patterns of clients and expand its marketing efforts. Banks and financial institutions use it to detect credit card frauds by recognizing the patterns involved in fake transactions.

The Knack

There is definitely a knack to Data Mining, as there is with any other field of web research activities. That is why it is referred as a craft rather than a science. A craft is the skilled practicing of an occupation.

One point I would like to make here is that data mining solutions offers an analytical perspective into the performance of a company depending on the historical data but one need to consider unknown external events and deceitful activities. On the flip side it is more critical especially for Regulatory bodies to forecast such activities in advance and take necessary measures to prevent such events in future.

In Closing

There are many important niches of Web Data Research that this article has not covered. But I hope that this article will provide you a stage to drill down further into this subject, if you want to do so!

Should you have any queries, please feel free to mail me. I would be pleased to answer each of your queries in detail.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining-Explained&id=4341782

Boost Up Your Business With Scanning Services

To manage Record, you have to do various task. It involves identifying, classifying, storing, circulating and disposing of documents. The process of record management becomes time consuming and costly. Through computer and other latest technological equipment, it becomes easier and less expensive.

When the Records are in bigger size and consume more time and money, it is wise decision to hire some scanning services. There are various scanning services are available in the market. I mention some of them in bellow mention list:

o Document Scanning - Document scanning services converts important data into electronic format. This will help any business to access any document easily and quickly. Document scanning give feature of data portability. It also minimizes data storage space as well as improves data efficiency.

o Paper Scanning - Paper Scanning Services can make your life easy by having all you papers available at you finger tips. In business there are various paper require for day-to-day transactions and it is very difficult to maintain huge amount of paper records. Very rare time it is available at appropriate time. Paper scanning services is very impressive way to decrease the stress of paper management from the head.

o Periodicals Scanning - Periodicals are having vital data and not always handy or understandable. They are without doubt damageable and consume much space for storage. Periodicals scanning will provide electronic format, easy access and safe storage.

o Photo Scanning - Any small thing can make photo defective. Climate change also can damage the photo. So the managing photo is very difficult task. You can manage photo easily by scanning and converting it into the electronic format.

o Drawing Scanning - Drawing scanning services can support wide variety of drawing such as, Blueprint, Survey Plans, Topological maps, Mechanical drawings and other. This type of drawing needs more storage space. With the help of drawing scanning services you can get all your data in small amount of space.

o Microfiche Scanning - It is very important peace of document that stores huge amount of information. To read this document any one needs a microfiche reader. Using microfiche scanning service you will find the document readable without having machine to read the document.

o Film Scanning - Digitalization will help the business to move ahead from others. For film scanning you needs more professional and experienced people.

o Medical Record Scanning - Compared to paper medical records, electronic format will ease your processing time. Scanning medical records consist of the patients' symptoms, clinical findings, diagnosis, and treatment details. Some times, this type of document will be misplaced and you meet with huge loss. Scanning of medical record will give you fast and easy access to the document.

o Aperture Card Scanning - There are two type of aperture card; 35mm aperture cards and 16mm aperture cards. This type of card is mainly used to have important data in record. But to read this type of card you must need the machine. Outsourcing of aperture card scanning services will help you to save on aperture card reader.

o Microfilm Scanning - It is near to microfiche scanning where data is very important but hard to read. So microfilm scanning will help you to have electronic format on hand with feature of easy readability.

These are the some of the scanning services which can be utilized by business to improve their standard in this competitive market.

Ethan Allen is online marketer for Scanning Indexing. Scanning Indexing is a company providing all types of scanning services as well as indexing service. They follow 4S model to deliver services. They provide Speedy, Secure and Superiority scanning services at huge Savings.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Boost-Up-Your-Business-With-Scanning-Services&id=2248179

Scan to PDF and OCR Resource Directory

One of the coolest things you can do with Adobe Acrobat is scan paper documents into PDF files; not only can you save digital copies of important files (and then secure them as PDF files), you can run OCR (Optical Character Recognition) in Adobe Acrobat to convert those scanned documents into usable text. This allows you to copy content, search for specific words or phrases, even edit the text on what was once a printed page. Digitizing your documents can help you keep your desk paper-free, as well as give you options for using those papers that you never had before.

The scanning functionality is so awesome that we get a lot of questions from Acrobat users about how best to use it, so we’ve decided that it’s time to put together a directory to help you get answers to all your scanning and OCR questions. Here’s our comprehensive list of resources to help you become a scanning pro with Acrobat.

Please note: These resources cover scanning and OCR functionality in Acrobat X and Acrobat XI; the information will be relevant to you no matter which version you’re using.

Basic document scanning:

•     How to scan documents (infographic): Basic step-by-step instructions for scanning a file to PDF.
•     Scan a paper document to PDF (video tutorial): A 90-second video that walks you through Acrobat’s scan settings.
•     Taking the guesswork out of scanning to PDF (article): This long-form tutorial tells you how to get your scanner to play nice with Acrobat, which presets to use for your scan, and how to get the best OCR results with Acrobat.

OCR and text recognition:

    How to create a searchable text document from a scanned page (video tutorial): Once you’ve scanned a document, you need to make the text usable. This video shows you how.

    How to find and correct OCR errors (video tutorial): After running OCR, find and correct any mistakes in the document to makes sure all the text is accurate.

Editing, optimizing, and using scanned content:

•     How to edit text in a scanned PDF - Acrobat X (video tutorial): Use Acrobat X to recognize text in a scanned image, then make changes to that text. Also includes some tips for getting the best OCR results.
•     How to optimize a scanned PDF (video tutorial): This video walks you through the steps to improve the appearance of a scanned document (even remove stains on the page!).
•     Export scanned content to Word or Excel (video tutorial): You can scan a document and export the content to Word or Excel to keep working on that content. This video will give you a few tips on how to export easily and accurately.

On-demand seminar (25-minute video). This is a long-form video seminar covering OCR and scanning to PDF using Acrobat X. The video includes: Ian Campbell on taking your correspondence totally paperless by scanning to PDF; David Mankin on how to use OCR in Acrobat X; an interview with our very own Ali Hanyaloglu on OCR basics; and Dave Merchant with scanning updates in Acrobat.

Source:http://blogs.adobe.com/acrobat/scan-to-pdf-and-ocr-resource-directory/

Web Data Extraction / Scraping Data from Kitco Inc. Text Only Market Page

I wish to capture data from

<html>
<head>
<title>Text Only Market Page</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head>

<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<br><br>
<pre>
<b><font size=6>
  Kitco Inc.

  Text Only Market Page</font></b>

    <a href="http://www.kitco.com/market/">Graphic version of this page</a>

    <a href="http://www.kitco.com/market/LFrate.html">Precious Metals Lease Rates</a> 
    <a href="http://www.kitco.com/gold.londonfix.html">Historical Price Data</a> 
    <a href="http://www.kitco.com/market/marketnews.html">Precious Metals News Headlines</a>

    <font size=4><b><a href="https://online.kitco.com/bullion/completelist_USD.html#gold">Buy gold and silver online direct from Kitco!</a>
   Live quotes for all bullion products.</b></font>


   --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   London Fix          GOLD          SILVER       PLATINUM           PALLADIUM
                   AM       PM                  AM       PM         AM       PM
   --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   Jun 19,2012   1628.50   1625.50   28.8100   1486.00   1486.00   629.00   634.00 
   Jun 18,2012   1623.50   1615.50   28.4300   1486.00   1484.00   626.00   628.00 
   --------------------------------------------------------------------------------


                  New York Spot Price
                MARKET IS OPEN
            Will close in 4 hour 25 minutes
   ----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Metals          Bid        Ask           Change        Low       High
   ----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Gold         1619.80     1620.80     -8.90  -0.55%    1616.60  1632.70
   Silver         28.46       28.56     -0.28  -0.97%      28.24    28.95
   Platinum     1479.00     1489.00      0.00   0.00%    1476.00  1500.00
   Palladium     627.00      632.00      0.00   0.00%     622.00   639.00
   ----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Last Update on Jun 19, 2012 at 12:50.59
   ----------------------------------------------------------------------


                Asia / Europe Spot Price
                MARKET IS OPEN
            Will close in 4 hours 25 minutes
   ----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Metals                      Bid          Ask      Change from NY close
   ----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Gold                      1619.80      1620.80     -8.90   -0.55%
   Silver                      28.46        28.56     -0.28   -0.97%
   Platinum                  1479.00      1489.00     +0.00   +0.00%
   Palladium                  627.00       632.00     +0.00   +0.00%
   ----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Last Update on Jun 19, 2012 at 12:50.59
   ----------------------------------------------------------------------


<b>   File created on Tue Jun 19 12:51:04 2012</b>


        <style type="text/css"><!--
 #main_container_footer {width:100%;text-align: center;}
    #main_container_footer #footer_container {width:auto; margin:25px auto 25px auto;}
    #main_container_footer #footer_container ul {margin:0; padding:0;}
    #main_container_footer #footer_container ul li {float:left; display:inline; list-style:none; padding:0 8px; font-family:Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:12px; color:#000; border-right:1px #000 solid;}
    #main_container_footer #footer_container ul li a {font-family:Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:12px; color:#000; text-decoration:underline; font-weight:normal;}
    #main_container_footer #footer_container ul li a:hover {color:#ac1a2f; text-decoration:none; font-weight:normal;}
    #main_container_footer #footer_container ul li.no_border {border:0px;}
--></style>
  <table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr><td>
 <div id="main_container_footer">
        <div id="footer_container">
            <ul>
                <li class="no_border"><script type="text/javascript">
copyright=new Date();
update=copyright.getFullYear();
document.write("&copy; "+ update + " Kitco Metals Inc.");
</script></li>
                <li><a href="https://corp.kitco.com/index.html">About Us</a></li>
                <li><a href="http://www.kitco.com/TermsofUse/" target="_top" onclick="Window_open(this.href,'KITCO','top=120,left=250,width=500,height=350'); return false">Website Terms of Use</a></li>
                <li><a href="https://online.kitco.com/help/privacy_policy.html" target="_top" onclick="Window_open(this.href,'KITCO','top=120,left=250,width=500,height=350'); return false">Privacy Policy</a></li>
                <li><a href="http://www.kitco.com/ads/">Advertise With Us</a></li>
                <li><a href="https://corp.kitco.com/en/corporate_culture.html">Careers</a></li>
                <li><a href="https://corp.kitco.com/en/contact.html" target="_top" onclick="Window_open(this.href,'KITCO','top=120,left=250,width=500,height=350'); return false">Contact Us</a></li>
                <li class="no_border"><a href="https://corp.kitco.com/en/feedback.html" target="_top" onclick="Window_open(this.href,'KITCO','top=120,left=250,width=500,height=350'); return false">Feedback</a></li>
            </ul>
        </div>
    </div> 

    </td></tr></table><br /><br />
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
<!--
function Window_open (Address) {
  NewWindow = window.open(Address, "Popup", "width=695,height=600,left=100,top=200,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes");
  NewWindow.focus();
}
// -->
</script>
 <!-- img src="http://www.kitco.com/scripts/counter/counter.pl?txtonlyE.txt" width="1" height="1" -->
<!-- Google-Analytics Code-->
<script type="text/javascript">
  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-4074364-3']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
  })();
</script>
</body>
</html>

More specifically, I am looking to capture the following data:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
London Fix          GOLD          SILVER       PLATINUM           PALLADIUM
               AM       PM                  AM       PM         AM       PM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jun 19,2012   1628.50   NA        28.8100   1486.00   1486.00   629.00   634.00 
Jun 18,2012   1623.50   1615.50   28.4300   1486.00   1484.00   626.00   628.00 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Does anybody have any suggestions how I can do this using PHP?



1 Answer



Quick and dirty regex method:

$data = file_get_contents('http://www.kitco.com/texten/texten.html');
preg_match_all('/([A-Z]{3,5}\s+[0-9]{1,2},[0-9]{4}\s+([0-9.NA]{2,10}\s+){1,7})/si',$data,$result);

$records = array();
foreach($result[1] as $date) {
    $temp = preg_split('/\s+/',$date);
    $index = array_shift($temp);
    $index.= array_shift($temp);
    $records[$index] = implode(',',$temp);
}
print_R($records);

Note, you'd probably want to add some validation, etc.


Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11103001/web-data-extraction-scraping-data-from-kitco-inc-text-only-market-page

Scraping webdata from a website that loads data in a streaming fashion

I'm trying to scrape some data off of the FEC.gov website using python for a project of mine. Normally I use python

mechanize and beautifulsoup to do the scraping.

I've been able to figure out most of the issues but can't seem to get around a problem. It seems like the data is

streamed into the table and mechanize.Browser() just stops listening.

So here's the issue: If you visit http://query.nictusa.com/cgi-bin/can_ind/2011_P80003338/1/A ... you get the first 500

contributors whose last name starts with A and have given money to candidate P80003338 ... however, if you use

browser.open() at that url all you get is the first ~5 rows.

I'm guessing its because mechanize isn't letting the page fully load before the .read() is executed. I tried putting a

time.sleep(10) between the .open() and .read() but that didn't make much difference.

And I checked, there's no javascript or AJAX in the website (or at least none are visible when you use the 'view-

source'). SO I don't think its a javascript issue.

Any thoughts or suggestions? I could use selenium or something similar but that's something that I'm trying to avoid.

-Will

2 Answers

Why not use an html parser like lxml with xpath expressions.

I tried

>>> import lxml.html as lh
>>> data = lh.parse('http://query.nictusa.com/cgi-bin/can_ind/2011_P80003338/1/A')
>>> name = data.xpath('/html/body/table[2]/tr[5]/td[1]/a/text()')
>>> name
[' AABY, TRYGVE']
>>> name = data.xpath('//table[2]/*/td[1]/a/text()')
>>> len(name)
500
>>> name[499]
' AHMED, ASHFAQ'
>>>



Similarly, you can create xpath expression of your choice to work with.


Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9435512/scraping-webdata-from-a-website-that-loads-data-in-a-streaming-

fashion

How can I circumvent page view limits when scraping web data using Python?

I am using Python to scrape US postal code population data from http:/www.city-data.com, through this directory: http://www.city-data.com/zipDir.html. The specific pages I am trying to scrape are individual postal code pages with URLs like this: http://www.city-data.com/zips/01001.html. All of the individual zip code pages I need to access have this same URL Format, so my script simply does the following for postal_code in range:

    Creates URL given postal code
    Tries to get response from URL
    If (2), Check the HTTP of that URL
    If HTTP is 200, retrieves the HTML and scrapes the data into a list
    If HTTP is not 200, pass and count error (not a valid postal code/URL)
    If no response from URL because of error, pass that postal code and count error
    At end of script, print counter variables and timestamp

The problem is that I run the script and it works fine for ~500 postal codes, then suddenly stops working and returns repeated timeout errors. My suspicion is that the site's server is limiting the page views coming from my IP address, preventing me from completing the amount of scraping that I need to do (all 100,000 potential postal codes).

My question is as follows: Is there a way to confuse the site's server, for example using a proxy of some kind, so that it will not limit my page views and I can scrape all of the data I need?

Thanks for the help! Here is the code:

##POSTAL CODE POPULATION SCRAPER##

import requests

import re

import datetime

def zip_population_scrape():

    """
    This script will scrape population data for postal codes in range
    from city-data.com.
    """
    postal_code_data = [['zip','population']] #list for storing scraped data

    #Counters for keeping track:
    total_scraped = 0
    total_invalid = 0
    errors = 0


    for postal_code in range(1001,5000):

        #This if statement is necessary because the postal code can't start
        #with 0 in order for the for statement to interate successfully
        if postal_code <10000:
            postal_code_string = str(0)+str(postal_code)
        else:
            postal_code_string = str(postal_code)

        #all postal code URLs have the same format on this site
        url = 'http://www.city-data.com/zips/' + postal_code_string + '.html'

        #try to get current URL
        try:
            response = requests.get(url, timeout = 5)
            http = response.status_code

            #print current for logging purposes
            print url +" - HTTP:  " + str(http)

            #if valid webpage:
            if http == 200:

                #save html as text
                html = response.text

                #extra print statement for status updates
                print "HTML ready"

                #try to find two substrings in HTML text
                #add the substring in between them to list w/ postal code
                try:           

                    found = re.search('population in 2011:</b> (.*)<br>', html).group(1)

                    #add to # scraped counter
                    total_scraped +=1

                    postal_code_data.append([postal_code_string,found])

                    #print statement for logging
                    print postal_code_string + ": " + str(found) + ". Data scrape successful. " + str(total_scraped) + " total zips scraped."
                #if substrings not found, try searching for others
                #and doing the same as above   
                except AttributeError:
                    found = re.search('population in 2010:</b> (.*)<br>', html).group(1)

                    total_scraped +=1

                    postal_code_data.append([postal_code_string,found])
                    print postal_code_string + ": " + str(found) + ". Data scrape successful. " + str(total_scraped) + " total zips scraped."

            #if http =404, zip is not valid. Add to counter and print log        
            elif http == 404:
                total_invalid +=1

                print postal_code_string + ": Not a valid zip code. " + str(total_invalid) + " total invalid zips."

            #other http codes: add to error counter and print log
            else:
                errors +=1

                print postal_code_string + ": HTTP Code Error. " + str(errors) + " total errors."

        #if get url fails by connnection error, add to error count & pass
        except requests.exceptions.ConnectionError:
            errors +=1
            print postal_code_string + ": Connection Error. " + str(errors) + " total errors."
            pass

        #if get url fails by timeout error, add to error count & pass
        except requests.exceptions.Timeout:
            errors +=1
            print postal_code_string + ": Timeout Error. " + str(errors) + " total errors."
            pass


    #print final log/counter data, along with timestamp finished
    now= datetime.datetime.now()
    print now.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M")
    print str(total_scraped) + " total zips scraped."
    print str(total_invalid) + " total unavailable zips."
    print str(errors) + " total errors."



Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25452798/how-can-i-circumvent-page-view-limits-when-scraping-web-data-using-python

Web data scraping (online news comments) with Scrapy (Python)

Since you seem like the try-first ask-question later type (that's a very good thing), I won't give you an answer, but a

(very detailed) guide on how to find the answer.

The thing is, unless you are a yahoo developer, you probably don't have access to the source code you're trying to

scrape. That is to say, you don't know exactly how the site is built and how your requests to it as a user are being

processed on the server-side. You can, however, investigate the client-side and try to emulate it. I like using Chrome

Developer Tools for this, but you can use others such as FF firebug.

So first off we need to figure out what's going on. So the way it works, is you click on the 'show comments' it loads

the first ten, then you need to keep clicking for the next ten comments each time. Notice, however, that all this

clicking isn't taking you to a different link, but lively fetches the comments, which is a very neat UI but for our

case requires a bit more work. I can tell two things right away:

    They're using javascript to load the comments (because I'm staying on the same page).
    They load them dynamically with AJAX calls each time you click (meaning instead of loading the comments with the

page and just showing them to you, with each click it does another request to the database).

Now let's right-click and inspect element on that button. It's actually just a simple span with text:

<span>View Comments (2077)</span>

By looking at that we still don't know how that's generated or what it does when clicked. Fine. Now, keeping the

devtools window open, let's click on it. This opened up the first ten. But in fact, a request was being made for us to

fetch them. A request that chrome devtools recorded. We look in the network tab of the devtools and see a lot of

confusing data. Wait, here's one that makes sense:

http://news.yahoo.com/_xhr/contentcomments/get_comments/?content_id=42f7f6e0-7bae-33d3-aa1d-

3dfc7fb5cdfc&_device=full&count=10&sortBy=highestRated&isNext=true&offset=20&pageNumber=2&_media.modules.content_commen

ts.switches._enable_view_others=1&_media.modules.content_comments.switches._enable_mutecommenter=1&enable_collapsed_com

ment=1

See? _xhr and then get_comments. That makes a lot of sense. Going to that link in the browser gave me a JSON object

(looks like a python dictionary) containing all the ten comments which that request fetched. Now that's the request you

need to emulate, because that's the one that gives you what you want. First let's translate this to some normal reqest

that a human can read:

go to this url: http://news.yahoo.com/_xhr/contentcomments/get_comments/
include these parameters: {'_device': 'full',
          '_media.modules.content_comments.switches._enable_mutecommenter': '1',
          '_media.modules.content_comments.switches._enable_view_others': '1',
          'content_id': '42f7f6e0-7bae-33d3-aa1d-3dfc7fb5cdfc',
          'count': '10',
          'enable_collapsed_comment': '1',
          'isNext': 'true',
          'offset': '20',
          'pageNumber': '2',
          'sortBy': 'highestRated'}

Now it's just a matter of trial-and-error. However, a few things to note here:

    Obviously the count is what decides how many comments you're getting. I tried changing it to 100 to see what

happens and got a bad request. And it was nice enough to tell me why - "Offset should be multiple of total rows". So

now we understand how to use offset

    The content_id is probably something that identifies the article you are reading. Meaning you need to fetch that

from the original page somehow. Try digging around a little, you'll find it.

    Also, you obviously don't want to fetch 10 comments at a time, so it's probably a good idea to find a way to fetch

the number of total comments somehow (either find out how the page gets it, or just fetch it from within the article

itself)

    Using the devtools you have access to all client-side scripts. So by digging you can find that that link to

/get_comments/ is kept within a javascript object named YUI. You can then try to understand how it is making the

request, and try to emulate that (though you can probably figure it out yourself)

    You might need to overcome some security measures. For example, you might need a session-key from the original

article before you can access the comments. This is used to prevent direct access to some parts of the sites. I won't

trouble you with the details, because it doesn't seem like a problem in this case, but you do need to be aware of it in

case it shows up.

    Finally, you'll have to parse the JSON object (python has excellent built-in tools for that) and then parse the

html comments you are getting (for which you might want to check out BeautifulSoup).

As you can see, this will require some work, but despite all I've written, it's not an extremely complicated task

either.

So don't panic.

It's just a matter of digging and digging until you find gold (also, having some basic WEB knowledge doesn't hurt).

Then, if you face a roadblock and really can't go any further, come back here to SO, and ask again. Someone will help

you.


Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20218855/web-data-scraping-online-news-comments-with-scrapy-python

A good web data extraction/screen scraper program?

I need to capture product data from a site on a regular basis and wondered if any one knows of a good software program? I've trialed Mozenda but its a monthly subscription and pricey in the long term. Obviously something thats free would be best but I don't mind paying either. Just need a decent program thats reliable and doesn't require much programming knowledge.

You can try ScraperWiki.com if you know python.

I've experimented with Screen-Scraper and found it easy to use. The application comes in multiple versions: basic (which is free), professional, and enterprise. Also, multiple platforms are supported.

Hire a programmer to do it so that there is only a one off cost. I often see similar projects on freelancing websites like Elance and oDesk.

I really like iMacros. You can give it a test drive to see if it meets your needs with the totally free Firefox extension (there's also IE versions), but there are also more full featured application and "server" versions that have more features and ability to do thing in an unattended manner.

Here are some other alternatives to consider:

    License the data from the provider. Call em up and ask 'em.

    Use Amazon Mechanical Turk to get humans to copy and paste and format it for ya. They are cheap.

    For automation, it depends on how complicated the HTML is and how often it changes. You could use Excel's Web Data Import if it's really simple.


You can use irobot from IRobotSoft, which is totally free, and provides more functionalityies than other paid software. Watch demos here http://irobotsoft.com/help/ for how simple it is.

Questions on their forum were answered very quickly.


Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2334164/a-good-web-data-extraction-screen-scraper-program

How to login to website and extract data using PHP [closed]

I have installed the tiny tiny rss on to my computer (Windows) and also have Xampp installed (localhost).

I want to be able to use PHP to extract data from the Tiny tiny RSS webpage.

I have tried this it which just opens the front page:

<?php
$homepage = file_get_contents('my install tiny tiny rss url');
echo $homepage;
?>

But how do I login and extract the data.

You can use cURL to send post data and headers. To login you need to replicate the exact data exchange between the client and the server.


SOurce: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20611918/how-to-login-to-website-and-extract-data-using-php

Is it ok to scrape data from Google results?

I'd like to fetch results from Google using curl to detect potential duplicate content. Is there a high risk of being banned by Google?

Google will eventually block your IP when you exceed a certain amount of requests.



Google disallows automated access in their TOS, so if you accept their terms you would break them.

That said, I know of no lawsuit from Google against a scraper. Even Microsoft scraped Google, they powered their search engine Bing with it. They got caught in 2011 red handed :)

There are two options to scrape Google results:

1) Use their API

    You can issue around 40 requests per hour You are limited to what they give you, it's not really useful if you want to track ranking positions or what a real user would see. That's something you are not allowed to gather.

    If you want a higher amount of API requests you need to pay.
    60 requests per hour cost 2000 USD per year, more queries require a custom deal.

2) Scrape the normal result pages

    Here comes the tricky part. It is possible to scrape the normal result pages. Google does not allow it.
    If you scrape at a rate higher than 15 keyword requests per hour you risk detection, higher than 20/h will get you blocked from my experience.
    By using multiple IPs you can up the rate, so with 100 IP addresses you can scrape up to 2000 requests per hour. (50k a day)
    There is an open source search engine scraper written in PHP at http://scraping.compunect.com It allows to reliable scrape Google, parses the results properly and manages IP addresses, delays, etc. So if you can use PHP it's a nice kickstart, otherwise the code will still be useful to learn how it is done.


Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22657548/is-it-ok-to-scrape-data-from-google-results

Data Scraping from PDF and Excel

I am doing a little data scraping, There are 3 types of file from which i am scraping data.

1- HTML
2- PDF
3- Excel(xls)

For HTML i am comfortable, i am using HTML Agility for that.

For PDF and excel i need suggestions from anyone.



Concerning Excel. If you are in a MS environment you can either do Office Automation or use OLEDB. In a Java

environment look at Apache POI.

EDIT: Concerning PDF in Java try Apache PDFBox . Can also work in .NET using IKVM

I can recommend Cogniview's PDF2XL, a reasonably inexpensive commercial product, to extract data from tables in PDF

files into Excel. We have used it with great success.

HTML Agility is a library. Its good to use. But then, why do you need separate tools for different data extraction

purposes? Use Automation Anywhere to extract data from any source. As far as I know, it would work for all the three

sources you have specified. Google it.

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3147803/data-scraping-from-pdf-and-excel

Excel VBA Data Mining Real-Time Data from a Web Page that Refreshes Data

I want to capture real-time data that updates into a table on a webpage; I prefer capturing it into excel using VBA, but I will write it in .NET C# or VB if I that is easier.

the data updates about 1 or 2 seconds, and I want to just grab the latest data quotes and log it into my spreadsheet; the table names are the same, only the data refreshes, and it does so automatically on the web page.

I've done a lot of Excel VBA and I know how to download a URL to a file--this is NOT what I want; I want to gain access to my webpage that is active and grab the data updates after I've logged into my site and selected a webpage that I like.

Is there a simple way to access this data on the webpage from Excel or .Net? Because it refreshes no more than once every 1 or 2 seconds, it is easy to just keep checking it for updates, and I can compare the latest data to see if it actually refreshed.


In Excel 2003, use Data/Import External Data/New Web Query
Browse to your page and select the table you want to import.
After that you can either do a manual Refresh, or use a timer procedure to do something like:

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9855794/excel-vba-data-mining-real-time-data-from-a-web-page-that-refreshes-data

Need to pull data from a website…web query? macro?

I have a list of every DOT # (Dept. of Trans.) in the country. I want to find out insurance effective date for each one of these companies. If you go to http://li-public.fmcsa.dot.gov --> "continue" --> then from the dropdown select "carrier search" and hit "go" it'll take you to a search form (that is the only way to get to this screen).

From there, you can input a DOT # X (use 61222 as an example) and it'll bring you to another screen. Click "view report in HTML" and then down on the bottom you'll see "Active/Pending Insurance". I want to pull the "effective date" from that page and stick it in the spreadsheet next to the DOT # X that I already know.

Of the thousands of DOT #'s in my list, not all will have filings on this website, if that makes a difference.

Can this be done with a Macro or Excel Web Query? I know I probably sound like a total novice, but I'd appreciate any help I could get.

Can you do it? Frankly even if you could you'd lock up the spreadsheet while it's doing that processing. And in the end, how would you handle an error half-way through?

I'd not do this in a client-facing application. This sounds more like something to do in server-side app that can do the processing and gather the information in a more controlled environment. Then you Excel spreadsheet could query that app and get the information in one fell swoop. Error handling is much simpler and you don't end up sitting there staring at Excel why it works its way through thousands of web sites. It was not built to do that elegantly.

What do you write the web service I'm describing in? Well it depends on your preference. Me, I'd write it in Ruby on Rails since it can easily handle the scraping aspect of the task and can report the data out easily as well. But it really falls back to whatever you're most comfortable coding in.


Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15286429/need-to-pull-data-from-a-website-web-query-macro

How to extract data from web 2.0 graphs using a scraper

I have recently come across a web page containing a graph object that displays the (x, y) values on the object as the mouse is rolled across it. Is there any way to automate the extraction of this data?

How is the graph data loaded? If embedded in the page source then you can extract it with xpath or regex. Else use Firebug to see how it is loaded.



You will need a solution that works inside the web browser, so the AJAX/Javascript is properly rendered.

I have used iMacros with good success for web scraping in the past. There are free/open-source and "PRO" paid editions (comparison table here).

Another option is always to custom code something with the Microsoft webbrowser control.


Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3980774/how-to-extract-data-from-web-2-0-graphs-using-a-scraper

Legality of Web Scraping vs Normal Use

I know the topic of web scraping has been discussed before (example), and I understand it's a bit of a grey area depending on a lot of factors (e.g. website's terms of use).

What I'd like to ask is: how is web scraping any different from (a) how we access the webpage via a web browser, and (b) how web crawlers (e.g. Google) download and index webpages?

Without knowing the legal background, I can't help but think that they're all just HTTP requests. If web scraping is illegal, then so should crawling and indexing (for instance be illegal).

Of course if your program is hitting the server so hard that it causes a denial of service, it's a different story altogether... my point is simply accessing and using data that is already open to the public.



I know this is a dead thread, but it would be nice to place some legal implications here due to its ranking in my Google Search. I cannot help but figure I am not the only one who searches like I do.

Legally, in the US, there are a few factors that seem to be important.

    Are you doing anything that is akin to hacking or gaining unauthorized access via the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Exploiting vulnerabilities and passing SQL in the URL to open a database no matter how bad the idiot programming like that was is illegal with a 15 year sentence (see the cases where an individual exploited security vulnerabilities in Verizon). Also, add a time out even if you round robin or use proxies. DDoS attacks are attacks. 1000 requests per second can shut down a lot of servers providing public information. The result here is up to 15 years in jail.

    Copyright Law: As mentioned, pure replication of data is illegal. Even 4% replication has been deemed a breach. With the recent gutting of the DMCA, a person is even more vulnerable to civil and criminal penalties.

    Trespass and Chattels: The following from wikipedia says it all.

    U.S. courts have acknowledged that users of "scrapers" or "robots" may be held liable for committing trespass to chattels,[5][6] which involves a computer system itself being considered personal property upon which the user of a scraper is trespassing. The best known of these cases, eBay v. Bidder's Edge, resulted in an injunction ordering Bidder's Edge to stop accessing, collecting, and indexing auctions from the eBay web site.

    Paywalls and Product: When going behind paywalls and breaching contract by clicking an agreement not to do something and then doing it, you add fuel to the protection of negligence v. willingness [an issue for damages and penalties not guilt] in civil and any criminal trials. (sorry originally wanted to say ignorance but it really isn't a defense)

    International: EU law and other law is way more lax. Corporations with big budgets dominate our legal landscape. They control the system in a very real way with their $$$.

Basically, get public information and information that is available without going behind a pay wall. Think like a user of the internet and combine a bunch of sources into a unique product. Don't just 'steal' an entire site (it isn't really stealing if it is a government site that offers public data especially for download but is if you download all or even more than a couple of the listings on ebay). Read the terms and conditions to know who actually owns the content.

Here are a few examples. Trulia owns its information but you could use it to go to an agents website and collect a legal amount of information. The legal amount is determinable. However, a public MLS listing lookup site with no agreement or terms and offering data to the public is fair game. The MLS numbers lists, however, are normally not fair game.

If a researcher can get to data, so can you. If a researcher needs permission, so do you. A computer is like having a million corporate researchers at your disposal.

AS for company policy, it is usually used internally to shield from liability and serves as a warning but is not entirely enforceable. The legal parts letting you know about copyrights and such are and usually are supposed to be known by everyone. Complete ignorance is not a legal protection. It does provide a ground set of rules. Be nice, or get banned is that message as far as I know.

My personal strategy is to start with public data and embellish it within legal means.


Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14735791/legality-of-web-scraping-vs-normal-use

Anyone knows an online tool that can scrape a page and create a REST API for the scraped data?

I'm looking for a SaaS solution that is able to login to a platform, scrape data (reports) and then allow accessing the data through an API. I have some reporting platforms that provide web reporting and email reporting but with no API. Online reporting doesn't help and email reporting, although can be automated and scraped, isn't so reliable.

If you are willing to do the scraping through your own connection, have a look at Import IO. They have a desktop application that you use to teach the system how to scrape a page, and then you run the crawler from that application - and you can run it for as long as you like, as far as I can tell.

You may then upload your data to the Import cloud, from where it is available via an API on the import.io servers. Useful data can be made public to donate it "to the commons" if you wish.


I did some more digging, found iMacros as a possible solution. Its Windows based, which is a drawback in my case, but it does allow automation of the scraping and afterwards interaction via common web scripting languages like PHP and ASP.net.


If you are familiar with jQuery, I think you can use node.js and Cheerio module, then you can create a simple application to do auto scraping. Actually I have already built a site to do on line web scraping based on the above mentioned tech, the site is www.datafiddle.net, you can take a look at it.


Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19646028/anyone-knows-an-online-tool-that-can-scrape-a-page-and-create-a-rest-api-for-the

Extract data from Web Scraping C#

I am MVC ASP.NET developer.

I have received the contents from any url, i.e. http, https etc. using WebRequest class.

I have received all the content of that particular url. (for now I took http://google.com)

My next step is to extract buttons, header, footer, colors, text etc.

Here is my code for now:

public ActionResult GetContent(UrlModel model) //model having a string URL
which is entered in a text box and method hits using submit button.
{
    //WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(model.URL);

    WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(model.URL);

    request.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;

    WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();

    Stream dataStream = response.GetResponseStream();

    StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(dataStream);

    string responseFromServer = reader.ReadToEnd();
    ViewBag.Response = responseFromServer;

    reader.Close();
    response.Close();
    return View();
}

Can someone help me with writing the code ?

Also do suggest me with some techniques of data extraction in C#.



Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21901162/extract-data-from-web-scraping-c-sharp

Scrapy, scraping price data from StubHub

I've been having a difficult time with this one.

I want to scrape all the prices listed for this Bruno Mars concert at the Hollywood Bowl so I can get the average price.

http://www.stubhub.com/bruno-mars-tickets/bruno-mars-hollywood-hollywood-bowl-31-5-2014-4449604/

I've located the prices in the HTML and the xpath is pretty straightforward but I cannot get any values to return.

I think it has something to do with the content being generated via javascript or ajax but I can't figure out how to send the correct request to get the code to work.

Here's what I have:

from scrapy.spider import BaseSpider
from scrapy.selector import Selector

from deeptix.items import DeeptixItem

class TicketSpider(BaseSpider):
    name = "deeptix"
    allowed_domains = ["stubhub.com"]
    start_urls = ["http://www.stubhub.com/bruno-mars-tickets/bruno-mars-hollywood-hollywood-bowl-31-5-2014-4449604/"]

def parse(self, response):
    sel = Selector(response)
    sites = sel.xpath('//div[contains(@class, "q_cont")]')
    items = []
    for site in sites:
        item = DeeptixItem()
        item['price'] = site.xpath('span[contains(@class, "q")]/text()').extract()
        items.append(item)
    return items

Any help would be greatly appreciated I've been struggling with this one for quite some time now. Thank you in advance!


Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22770917/scrapy-scraping-price-data-from-stubhub

How do you scrape AJAX pages?

Overview:

All screen scraping first requires manual review of the page you want to extract resources from. When dealing with AJAX you usually just need to analyze a bit more than just simply the HTML.

When dealing with AJAX this just means that the value you want is not in the initial HTML document that you requested, but that javascript will be exectued which asks the server for the extra information you want.

You can therefore usually simply analyze the javascript and see which request the javascript makes and just call this URL instead from the start.

Example:

Take this as an example, assume the page you want to scrape from has the following script:

<script type="text/javascript">
function ajaxFunction()
{
var xmlHttp;
try
  {
  // Firefox, Opera 8.0+, Safari
  xmlHttp=new XMLHttpRequest();
  }
catch (e)
  {
  // Internet Explorer
  try
    {
    xmlHttp=new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP");
    }
  catch (e)
    {
    try
      {
      xmlHttp=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
      }
    catch (e)
      {
      alert("Your browser does not support AJAX!");
      return false;
      }
    }
  }
  xmlHttp.onreadystatechange=function()
    {
    if(xmlHttp.readyState==4)
      {
      document.myForm.time.value=xmlHttp.responseText;
      }
    }
  xmlHttp.open("GET","time.asp",true);
  xmlHttp.send(null);
  }
</script>

Then all you need to do is instead do an HTTP request to time.asp of the same server instead. Example from w3schools.


Sporce: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/260540/how-do-you-scrape-ajax-pages

using Perl to scrape a website

I am interested in writing a perl script that goes to the following link and extracts the number 1975: https://familysearch.org/search/collection/results#count=20&query=%2Bevent_place_level_1%3ACalifornia%20%2Bevent_place_level_2%3A%22San%20Diego%22%20%2Bbirth_year%3A1923-1923~%20%2Bgender%3AM%20%2Brace%3AWhite&collection_id=2000219

That website is the amount of white men born in the year 1923 who live in San Diego County, California in 1940. I am trying to do this in a loop structure to generalize over multiple counties and birth years.

In the file, locations.txt, I put the list of counties, such as San Diego County.

The current code runs, but instead of the # 1975, it displays unknown. The number 1975 should be in $val\n.

I would very much appreciate any help!

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

use LWP::Simple;

open(L, "locations26.txt");

my $url = 'https://familysearch.org/search/collection/results#count=20&query=%2Bevent_place_level_1%3A%22California%22%20%2Bevent_place_level_2%3A%22%LOCATION%%22%20%2Bbirth_year%3A%YEAR%-%YEAR%~%20%2Bgender%3AM%20%2Brace%3AWhite&collection_id=2000219';

open(O, ">out26.txt");
 my $oldh = select(O);
 $| = 1;
 select($oldh);
 while (my $location = <L>) {
     chomp($location);
     $location =~ s/ /+/g;
      foreach my $year (1923..1923) {
                 my $u = $url;
                 $u =~ s/%LOCATION%/$location/;
                 $u =~ s/%YEAR%/$year/;
                 #print "$u\n";
                 my $content = get($u);
                 my $val = 'unknown';
                 if ($content =~ / of .strong.([0-9,]+)..strong. /) {
                         $val = $1;
                 }
                 $val =~ s/,//g;
                 $location =~ s/\+/ /g;
                 print "'$location',$year,$val\n";
                 print O "'$location',$year,$val\n";
         }
     }

Update: API is not a viable solution. I have been in contact with the site developer. The API does not apply to that part of the webpage. Hence, any solution pertaining to JSON will not be applicbale.



Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14654288/using-perl-to-scrape-a-website

Data Scraping using php

Here is my code

    $ip=$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];

    $url=file_get_contents("http://whatismyipaddress.com/ip/$ip");

    preg_match_all('/<th>(.*?)<\/th><td>(.*?)<\/td>/s',$url,$output,PREG_SET_ORDER);

    $isp=$output[1][2];

    $city=$output[9][2];

    $state=$output[8][2];

    $zipcode=$output[12][2];

    $country=$output[7][2];

    ?>
    <body>
    <table align="center">
    <tr><td>ISP :</td><td><?php echo $isp;?></td></tr>
    <tr><td>City :</td><td><?php echo $city;?></td></tr>
    <tr><td>State :</td><td><?php echo $state;?></td></tr>
    <tr><td>Zipcode :</td><td><?php echo $zipcode;?></td></tr>
    <tr><td>Country :</td><td><?php echo $country;?></td></tr>
    </table>
    </body>

How do I find out the ISP provider of a person viewing a PHP page?

Is it possible to use PHP to track or reveal it?

Error: http://i.imgur.com/LGWI8.png

Curl Scrapping

<?php
$curl_handle=curl_init();
curl_setopt( $curl_handle, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true );
$url='http://www.whatismyipaddress.com/ip/132.123.23.23';
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, Array("User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.15) Gecko/20080623 Firefox/2.0.0.15") );
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Your application name');
$query = curl_exec($curl_handle);

curl_close($curl_handle);
preg_match_all('/<th>(.*?)<\/th><td>(.*?)<\/td>/s',$url,$output,PREG_SET_ORDER);
echo $query;
$isp=$output[1][2];

$city=$output[9][2];

$state=$output[8][2];

$zipcode=$output[12][2];

$country=$output[7][2];
?>
<body>
<table align="center">
<tr><td>ISP :</td><td><?php echo $isp;?></td></tr>
<tr><td>City :</td><td><?php echo $city;?></td></tr>
<tr><td>State :</td><td><?php echo $state;?></td></tr>
<tr><td>Zipcode :</td><td><?php echo $zipcode;?></td></tr>
<tr><td>Country :</td><td><?php echo $country;?></td></tr>
</table>
</body>

Error: http://i.imgur.com/FJIq6.png

What's is wrong with my code here? Any alternative code , that i can use here.

I am not able to scrape that data as described here. http://i.imgur.com/FJIq6.png

P.S. Please post full code. It would be easier for me to understand.



Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10461088/data-scraping-using-php

PDF scraping using R

I have been using the XML package successfully for extracting HTML tables but want to extend to PDF's. From previous questions it does not appear that there is a simple R solution but wondered if there had been any recent developments

Failing that, is there some way in Python (in which I am a complete Novice) to obtain and manipulate pdfs so that I could finish the job off with the R XML package

Extracting text from PDFs is hard, and nearly always requires lots of care.

I'd start with the command line tools such as pdftotext and see what they spit out. The problem is that PDFs can store the text in any order, can use awkward font encodings, and can do things like use ligature characters (the joined up 'ff' and 'ij' that you see in proper typesetting) to throw you.

pdftotext is installable on any Linux system



Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7918718/pdf-scraping-using-r

Php Scraping data from a website

I am very new to programming and need a little help with getting data from a website and passing it into my PHP script.

The website is http://www.birthdatabase.com/.

I would like to plug in a name (First and Last) and retrieve the result. I know you can query the site by passing the name in the URL, but I am having problems scraping the results.

http://www.birthdatabase.com/cgi-bin/query.pl?textfield=FIRST&textfield2=LAST&age=&affid=

I am using the file_get_contents($URL) function to get the page but need help after that. Specifically, I would like to scrape only the results from a certain state if there are multiple results for that name.



You need the awesome simple_html_dom class.

With this class you can query the webpage's DOM in a similar way to jQuery.

First include the class in your page, then get the page content with this snippet:

$html = file_get_html('http://www.birthdatabase.com/cgi-bin/query.pl?textfield=' . $first . '&textfield2=' . $last . '&age=&affid=');

Then you can use CSS selections to scrape your data (something like this):

$n = 0;
foreach($html->find('table tbody tr td div font b table tbody') as $element) {
    @$row[$n]['tr']  = $element->find('tr')->text;
    $n++;
}

// output your data
print_r($row);



Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15601584/php-scraping-data-from-a-website

I am interested in obtaining data from different reddit subreddits. Does anyone know

if there is a reddit/other api similar like twitter does to crawl all the pages?


Yes, reddit has an API that can be used for a variety of purposes such as data

collection, automatic commenting bots, or even to assist in subreddit moderation.

There are a few places to discover information on reddit's API:

    github reddit wiki -- provides the overview and rules for using reddit's API

(follow the rules)
    automatically generated API docs -- provides information on the requests needed to

access most of the API endpoints
    /r/redditdev -- the reddit community dedicated to answering questions both about

reddit's source code and about reddit's API

If there is a particular programming language you are already familiar with, you

should check out the existing set of API wrappers for various languages. Despite my

bias (I am the package maintainer) I am quite certain PRAW, for python, has support

for the largest number of reddit API features.



Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14322834/obtaining-reddit-data

Scraping data in dynamic sites

I'm trying to scrape data from our local government. What I want is address from kids adoption offices. Here, in Brazil, all adoptions go through the government. So I have the URL of one office, there are 2 or 3 thousands more. But if I can manage to get one, the others will be easy. I made many attempts, bellow I show three.

The problem could be related to a Javascript (Ajax maybe) that refresh the page.

Note: I am not a PHP developer.

First attempt

echo '<html><head></head><body>';
echo '<h1>Scraper PHP GET 1</h1>';

echo ini_get("allow_url_fopen");
echo ini_get("allow_url_fopen");

// I used this url for test
//$url = 'http://www.portaldaadocao.com.br';

//This is the URL that I really want
$url = 'http://www.cnj.jus.br/cna/Controle/ConsultaPublicaBuscaControle.php?transacao=CONSULTA&vara=2673';

$html = file_get_contents($url);
var_dump($html);

echo '</body></html>';

// Output
// 11
// Warning:
file_get_contents(http://www.cnj.jus.br/cna/Controle/ConsultaPublicaBuscaControle.php?
transacao=CONSULTA&vara=2673) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: HTTP
request failed! HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found in /home/rsl/www/sc01_get.php on line 14
// bool(false)

Second attempt

echo '<html><head></head><body>';
echo '<h1>Scraper PHP CURL 3</h1>';

// I used this url for test
//$url = 'http://www.portaldaadocao.com.br';

//This is the URL that I really want
$url = 'http://www.cnj.jus.br/cna/Controle/ConsultaPublicaBuscaControle.php?transacao=CONSULTA&vara=2673';

$curl = curl_init($url);
@curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "foo");
@curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
@curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "POST");;

$html=@curl_exec($curl);

if (!$html) {
    echo "<br />cURL error number:" .curl_errno($curl);
    echo "<br />cURL error:" . curl_error($curl);
    exit;
}
else{
   echo '<br>begin HTML[';
    echo  $html;
   echo '<br>]end html ';
}
echo '</body></html>';

// Output
// 1

third attempt

function curl($url){
    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/535.6 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/16.0.897.0 Safari/535.6');
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, "cookie.txt");
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, "cookie.txt");
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 30);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, "http://www.windowsphone.com");

    $data = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
    return $data;
}

echo '<html><head></head><body>';
echo '<h1>Scraper PHP CURL 5</h1>';

// I used this url for test
//$url = 'http://www.portaldaadocao.com.br';

//This is the URL that I really want
$url = 'http://www.cnj.jus.br/cna/Controle/ConsultaPublicaBuscaControle.php?transacao=CONSULTA&vara=2673';

$curl = curl_init($url);
@curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "foo");
@curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
@curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "POST");;

$html=@curl($curl);


if (!$html) {
    echo "<br />cURL error number:" .curl_errno($curl);
    echo "<br />cURL error:" . curl_error($curl);
    exit;
}
else{
    echo '<br>begin HTML[';
    echo  $html;
    echo '<br>]end html ';
}
echo '</body></html>';

// Output
// cURL error number:0
// cURL error:

If the pages are really ajax based meaning the information that you need to scrape is loaded or shown through javascript execution, you will need another approach. You would need to automate with a real browser. You can go the Selenium route which can be written in a number of languages or use CasperJS with Javascript as the programming language.



Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24611046/scraping-data-in-dynamic-sites

What is the right way of storing screen-scraping data?

i'm working on a web site. it is scraping product details(names, features, prices etc.) from various web sites, processing and displaying them. i'am considering to run update script on each day and keep data fresh.

    scrape data
    process them
    store on database
    read(from db) and display them

i'am already storing all the data in a sql schema but i'm not sure. After each update, all the old records are vanishing. if the scraped new data comes corrupted somehow, there is nothing to show.

so, is there any common way to archive the old data? which one is more convenient: seperate sql schemas or xml files? or something else?

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13686474/what-is-the-right-way-of-storing-screen-scraping-data

Scraping dynamic data

I am scraping profiles on ask.fm for a research question. The problem is that only the top most recent questions are viewable and I have to click "view more" to see the next 15.

The source code for clicking view more looks like this:

<input class="submit-button-more submit-button-more-active" name="commit" onclick="return Forms.More.allowSubmit(this)" type="submit" value="View more" />

What is an easy way of calling this 4 times before scraping it. I want the most recent 60 posts on the site. Python is preferable.

You could probably use selenium to browse to the website and click on the button/link a few times. You can get that here:

    https://pypi.python.org/pypi/selenium

Or you might be able to do it with mechanize:

    http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/mechanize/

I have also heard good things about twill, but never used it myself:

    http://twill.idyll.org/



Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19437782/scraping-dynamic-data

Web Scraping data from different sites

I am looking for a few ideas on how can I solve a design problem I'm going to be faced with building a web scraper to scrape multiple sites. Writing the scraper(s) is not the problem, matching the data from different sites (which may have small differences) is.

For the sake of being generic assume that I am scraping something like this from two or more different sites:

    public class Data {
        public int id;
        public String firstname;
        public String surname;
        ....
    }

If i scrape this from two different sites, I will encounter the situation where I could have the following:

Site A: id=100, firstname=William, surname=Doe

Site B: id=1974, firstname=Bill, surname=Doe

Essentially, I would like to consider these two sets of data the same (they are the same person but with their name slightly different on each site). I am looking for possible design solutions that can handle this.

The only idea I've come up with is scraping the data from a third location and using it as a reference list. Then when I scrape site A or B I can, over time, build up a list of failures and store them in a list for each scraper so that it can know (if i find id=100 then i know that the firstname will be William etc). I can't help but feel this is a rubbish idea!

If you need any more info, or if you think my description is a bit naff, let me know!

Thanks,

DMcB


Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23970057/web-scraping-data-from-different-sites

Scrape Data Point Using Python

I am looking to scrape a data point using Python off of the url http://www.cavirtex.com/orderbook .

The data point I am looking to scrape is the lowest bid offer, which at the current moment looks like this:

<tr>
 <td><b>Jan. 19, 2014, 2:37 a.m.</b></td>
 <td><b>0.0775/0.1146</b></td>
 <td><b>860.00000</b></td>
 <td><b>66.65 CAD</b></td>
</tr>

The relevant point being the 860.00 . I am looking to build this into a script which can send me an email to alert me of certain price differentials compared to other exchanges.

I'm quite noobie so if in your explanations you could offer your thought process on why you've done certain things it would be very much appreciated.

Thank you in advance!

Edit: This is what I have so far which will return me the name of the title correctly, I'm having trouble grabbing the table data though.

import urllib2, sys
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

site= "http://cavirtex.com/orderbook"
hdr = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'}
req = urllib2.Request(site,headers=hdr)
page = urllib2.urlopen(req)
soup = BeautifulSoup(page)
print soup.title



Here is the code for scraping the lowest bid from the 'Buying BTC' table:

from selenium import webdriver

fp = webdriver.FirefoxProfile()
browser = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_profile=fp)
browser.get('http://www.cavirtex.com/orderbook')

lowest_bid = float('inf')
elements = browser.find_elements_by_xpath('//div[@id="orderbook_buy"]/table/tbody/tr/td')

for element in elements:
    text = element.get_attribute('innerHTML').strip('<b>|</b>')
    try:
        bid = float(text)
        if lowest_bid > bid:
            lowest_bid = bid
    except:
        pass

browser.quit()
print lowest_bid

In order to install Selenium for Python on your Windows-PC, run from a command line:

pip install selenium (or pip install selenium --upgrade if you already have it).

If you want the 'Selling BTC' table instead, then change "orderbook_buy" to "orderbook_sell".

If you want the 'Last Trades' table instead, then change "orderbook_buy" to "orderbook_trades".

Note:

If you consider performance critical, then you can implement the data-scraping via URL-Connection instead of Selenium, and have your program running much faster. However, your code will probably end up being a lot "messier", due to the tedious XML parsing that you'll be obliged to apply...

Here is the code for sending the previous output in an email from yourself to yourself:

import smtplib,ssl

def SendMail(username,password,contents):
    server = Connect(username)
    try:
        server.login(username,password)
        server.sendmail(username,username,contents)
    except smtplib.SMTPException,error:
        Print(error)
    Disconnect(server)

def Connect(username):
    serverName = username[username.index("@")+1:username.index(".")]
    while True:
        try:
            server = smtplib.SMTP(serverDict[serverName])
        except smtplib.SMTPException,error:
            Print(error)
            continue
        try:
            server.ehlo()
            if server.has_extn("starttls"):
                server.starttls()
                server.ehlo()
        except (smtplib.SMTPException,ssl.SSLError),error:
            Print(error)
            Disconnect(server)
            continue
        break
    return server

def Disconnect(server):
    try:
        server.quit()
    except smtplib.SMTPException,error:
        Print(error)

serverDict = {
    "gmail"  :"smtp.gmail.com",
    "hotmail":"smtp.live.com",
    "yahoo"  :"smtp.mail.yahoo.com"
}

SendMail("your_username@your_provider.com","your_password",str(lowest_bid))

The above code should work if your email provider is either gmail or hotmail or yahoo.

Please note that depending on your firewall configuration, it may ask your permission upon the first time you try it...



Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21217034/scrape-data-point-using-python

Boost Up Your Business With Scanning Services

To manage Record, you have to do various task. It involves identifying, classifying, storing, circulating and disposing of documents. The process of record management becomes time consuming and costly. Through computer and other latest technological equipment, it becomes easier and less expensive.

When the Records are in bigger size and consume more time and money, it is wise decision to hire some scanning services. There are various scanning services are available in the market. I mention some of them in bellow mention list:

o Document Scanning - Document scanning services converts important data into electronic format. This will help any business to access any document easily and quickly. Document scanning give feature of data portability. It also minimizes data storage space as well as improves data efficiency.

o Paper Scanning - Paper Scanning Services can make your life easy by having all you papers available at you finger tips. In business there are various paper require for day-to-day transactions and it is very difficult to maintain huge amount of paper records. Very rare time it is available at appropriate time. Paper scanning services is very impressive way to decrease the stress of paper management from the head.

o Periodicals Scanning - Periodicals are having vital data and not always handy or understandable. They are without doubt damageable and consume much space for storage. Periodicals scanning will provide electronic format, easy access and safe storage.

o Photo Scanning - Any small thing can make photo defective. Climate change also can damage the photo. So the managing photo is very difficult task. You can manage photo easily by scanning and converting it into the electronic format.

o Drawing Scanning - Drawing scanning services can support wide variety of drawing such as, Blueprint, Survey Plans, Topological maps, Mechanical drawings and other. This type of drawing needs more storage space. With the help of drawing scanning services you can get all your data in small amount of space.

o Microfiche Scanning - It is very important peace of document that stores huge amount of information. To read this document any one needs a microfiche reader. Using microfiche scanning service you will find the document readable without having machine to read the document.

o Film Scanning - Digitalization will help the business to move ahead from others. For film scanning you needs more professional and experienced people.

o Medical Record Scanning - Compared to paper medical records, electronic format will ease your processing time. Scanning medical records consist of the patients' symptoms, clinical findings, diagnosis, and treatment details. Some times, this type of document will be misplaced and you meet with huge loss. Scanning of medical record will give you fast and easy access to the document.

o Aperture Card Scanning - There are two type of aperture card; 35mm aperture cards and 16mm aperture cards. This type of card is mainly used to have important data in record. But to read this type of card you must need the machine. Outsourcing of aperture card scanning services will help you to save on aperture card reader.

o Microfilm Scanning - It is near to microfiche scanning where data is very important but hard to read. So microfilm scanning will help you to have electronic format on hand with feature of easy readability.

These are the some of the scanning services which can be utilized by business to improve their standard in this competitive market.

Ethan Allen is online marketer for Scanning Indexing. Scanning Indexing is a company providing all types of scanning services as well as indexing service. They follow 4S model to deliver services. They provide Speedy, Secure and Superiority scanning services at huge Savings.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Boost-Up-Your-Business-With-Scanning-Services&id=2248179

SEO Epiphany of an Offline Marketer Turned Online Marketer

SEO can be maddening for offline marketers such as myself transitioning to the online marketing world. In making this transition I just had an epiphany sparked by a discussion I just had with one of my Skype discussion groups. In offline marketing we are taught to use emotionally charged words depending on our targeted market. Words that evoke emotions such as greed, fear, love, hate, pride etc. are utilized throughout our marketing and is probably equivalent to keywords in online marketing.

When I sold Real Estate for buyers we focused a lot on pride, in my tax business fear was a dominating emotion especially fear of the IRS and fear of audits. In my tax business I specialized in Home Based Business owners and my two biggest client groups were Daycare Providers and Network Marketers. The most effective emotion in the Network Marketing industry was greed.

In offline marketing we send our advertising out through mediums that get us the best results. Newspapers and periodicals are sent to people's homes, flyers are put into people's hands or on their door our car, radio is broadcast to people listening to their radios. We learn how to get a response through our ads with these emotionally charged words.

Then we are taught how to write copy that not only uses these emotionally charged words but we are taught how to use tie downs like wouldn't it, couldn't it, shouldn't it. We are taught how to develop closing sequences that get lots of little yeses leading to the big yes.

Then we come to the online marketing arena and all the rules change. At first the changes are not obvious. We hear familiar terms like call to action and compelling headlines. But unlike in the offline marketing arena it appears that to play in this game you have to contend with this huge monster called Google. And this creates a huge paradigm shift in how one has to develop their marketing tactics. Offline we send our stuff out, online you have to be found. And you have to be found through Google. Bing does not really matter; Yahoo does not really matter only the Google search engine at this time really matters.

Sure there are advertising sites, Google AdWords, Craigslist and Facebook Classified ads and who knows what else is bound to pop up but none of these are true direct response marketing and function more like billboards and posters in high traffic areas. The closes thing to marketing material being sent directly to a person is email marketing which due to spam and individuals emails being overwhelmed with tons of stuff it is becoming increasingly ineffective unless you have a dedicated list looking forward to stuff you are sending them.

It seems that in order to market successfully on line you have to find out two things - what words or phrases that people are using to search for stuff on Google and what words and phrases that Google does not like. Online copywriters don't so much worry about closing sequences as they do Search Engine Optimization often called SEO. That means writing copy in such a way that Google spiders will find you and elevate you to the top of the heap on their clients searched words or phrases.

Besides such little things as meta tags, title tags, h1 tags and making sure your keywords and phrases are at the top of your copy, SEO is about two key elements. One is keywords, you know those words or phrases that people plug into Google to search for stuff and secondly Google perceived relevancy of your copy. Two websites being equal as far as keywords are concerned Google's perception of relevancy will determine who gets the top spots.

The precise keywords and phrases have to be strategically placed in your copy. But you have to be careful because certain words and phrases it seems Google has a hatred for and will band you. Keywords such as riches, wealth, success and money are among these words Google hates and could possibly even penalize you for using by forbidding your site from ever showing in their search results (I have a lot to say about such power being in the hands of one company but not today)

The density or the amount of times your selected keywords or phrases are placed in your copy becomes critical, too often and you will be penalized, not enough and you won't be recognized. Best rule of thumb is to use them were it makes sense in your copy. Trying to figure out percentages is simply not working with today's advanced algorithms. Best to focus on content with the understanding that if your key words or phrases are not in your copy then when people search for it you will not be found so where it makes sense you must use them.

Next is relevancy despite all the stuff we hear about backlinks there is far more to being determined as relevant by Google search engines than backlinks. Simple things such as being listed in the yellow pages can make your site more relevant than another site. Whereas backlinks are still very important you can have link spam that could make you irrelevant with Google. This topic is just too extensive a topic to cover here, besides this is about an epiphany concerning my transition from offline marketer to full time online marketing. But I will add this tidbit that I have learned about being perceived as relevant with Google. Avoid duplicate content. websites with identical pages, scraped content, heavily distributed articles and boiler plate pages/sites can hurt your relevancy perception with Google.

Even when you are the original author putting the exact same article into e-zines and blogs can hurt your relevancy if the same articles are posted on the websites you want to come up in the Google search engines. On the sites you want to rank in Google keep all content as original and unique as possible.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?SEO-Epiphany-of-an-Offline-Marketer-Turned-Online-Marketer&id=6713183