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If you're feeling a little more adventurous, try the Scraper extension for Chrome. Level 2: Scrape a single website with the Scraper extension A field should appear in the upper left corner of the table that says something like Copy to clipboard and Save to Excel

Choose the option Table to Excel – Display Inline (or Table Capture – Display Inline if you're in Chrome).Right-click on any table on a web page (try this list of countries in the Eurovision Song Contest, for example ).If you have them installed, you can just go ahead and: With some tables, just marking them in your browser and using copy and paste will work, but it will often mess up the structure or the formatting of the table. (Note: if you used to have an add-on called TableTools in Firefox and wonder where it went: it's the Table to Excel one. They're the same program, they just have different names because why make it easy. This is the first step in your scraping career: there are extensions for Chrome ( Table Capture ) and Firefox ( Table to Excel ), that help you easily copy tables from websites into Excel or a similar program. Still, there are some tools you can - and should - start using immediately. So let's get to it: how to scrape data yourself.Ī bit of a dampener first: scraping is one of the more advanced ways to gather data. Scrapers therefore occupy an important place in the scope of data sources available to data journalists. Also, not nearly every website has an API, but you can scrape info from virtually any site. Scrapers, in contrast, can extract anything you can see on a web page, and even some things you can't (the ones that are in the website's source code - we'll get to that in a second). They might limit the scope of data you have access to, or the extraction speed. They're much more stable because they're designed for data extraction, but: The website creator gets to decide the rules by which you can get access. If you haven't heard of those before: Application Programming Interfaces are portals that website creators use to grant developers direct access to the structured database where they store their information. This is also what differentiates scrapers from APIs. If the structure changes, your scraper might break and not produce the output you expect. They have to be configured for the exact structure of one website. If you need to scrape many differently structured sites, though, you'll quickly notice their biggest drawback: scrapers are pretty fragile. Repetition: scrapers can be reused in regular intervals as websites get updated.Automation: scrapers can save manual work.Speed: scrapers can process a lot of data in a short time.Big advantages to using scrapers include: They can come in the form of point-and-click tools or scripts that you write in a programming language. Scrapers, in practice, are little programs that extract and refine information from web pages. My main motivation for learning how to code has always been laziness: I hate doing the same boring thing twice, let alone 200,000 times. With 200,000 results, that still takes them more than a month, if they work full-time from 9 to 5 at constant speed, without a break. Let's say that takes me 5 seconds for each search result. One option, then, might be to copy the information on each result by hand. For that purpose, a handy table might be more practical. But it doesn't help me much if I want to analyze the underlying data – how much the average coffee package costs or which brands dominate the Amazon coffee market, for example. When I hit search, I get a list of results that's made to be easily readable for humans. Say, for example, I am looking for coffee on Amazon.