tinyurl.

com/SunneScrapingTutorial

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Scraping Without
Programming
© Samantha Sunne
What is scraping?
 What is scraping?

It means to grab data

through code, elbow
grease, or whatever other
method you have on hand.

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 How do journalists usually get data?

From Humans From Computers

Ask Nicely FOIA Download Scrape

Playing Hardball Playing Hardball

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 How do journalists usually get data?

From Humans From Computers

Ask Nicely FOIA Download Scrape

Playing Hardball Playing Hardball

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 How do journalists usually get data?

From Humans From Computers

Ask Nicely FOIA Download Scrape

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 How do journalists usually get data?

From Humans From Computers

Ask Nicely FOIA Download Scrape

Playing Hardball Playing Hardball

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Web scraping
Today we will extract data
from a single webpage.
This is different from
web crawling, document
scraping, and other kinds
of scraping.

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 HTML
We're going to scrape with HTML. This
is sometimes called source code.
This is how a
website looks
to a human.

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This is how it
looks to a
computer.

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Our goal is to
land
somewhere in
the middle.

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Sometimes source code
itself is interesting.
Jeb Bush's campaign
site included a detailed
summary of the movie
Die Hard.

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 HTML elements

HTML is broken into elements.

Elements are wrapped in tags, that look like this:

<h1>element</h1>

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 HTML elements
For example, tables: Or headers:

<table> <h1>
Here is my table, Here is my header.
between these table </h1>
tags.
</table>

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 HTML elements

There are a lot of different elements, identified by

tags like <h1>, <li> and <a>. If you don't know what a
tag means, use an HTML dictionary.

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Nested elements
Elements can be inside
other elements. That
means you can grab an
element and all the
elements inside it.

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 Nested elements

Table cell

One cell in a table has

1 the tag <td>, which
Table row stands for "table data."

A table row has the tag

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<tr>, and contains table Table
cells inside it.

A table element
3 contains both table
rows and table cells. It
has the tag <table>.

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 Nested elements

You can grab a cell from a

table, a row, or a whole
table.

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Technique 1
ImportHTML
 importHTML

Type this formula in Google Sheets:

=ImportHTML(“url”, “element”)

The url is the link you are scraping.

The element is the HTML tag.

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 importHTML

For example:

=ImportHTML("https://www.fdic.gov/resources/re
solutions/bank-failures/failed-bank-list/",
"table")

This scrapes a table of failed banks from the FDIC.

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 Hooray!
We scraped a live webpage.
But the ImportHTML formula is pretty limited.
Let's try something more advanced.

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Technique 2
ImportXML
 Nested elements

Not all data is in a

convenient table.

Instead, you can use an

XPATH.

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 What is an XPATH?
An XPATH is like an address to a very
specific bit of data.
 XPATH Examples

All bold text //b

All headers (large text) //h1

All headers containing the //h1[contains(.,'coun

word "country" try')]
//h1[@class='country-
All headers with the class
name']
"country-name"

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 Nested elements

You can also use nested

elements in an XPATH,
just like we saw with
HTML.

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 XPATH Examples
//table[@id='vaccines']/tr[56]/td[3]

//table[@id='vaccines'] tr[56]/td[3]

in the table called

// on this page in row 56 in cell 3
'vaccines'
Having trouble
finding the
XPATH?
You can also use
the Web Inspector.

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XPATH
Now that we know what
XPATH is (more or less),
let's use it to scrape
something a lot more
specific than tables.

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 importXML

Type this formula in Google Sheets:

=ImportXML(“url”, “XPATH”)

The url is the link you are scraping.

The XPATH is the address of the data.

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 importXML

For example:

=ImportXML("https://source.opennews.org/jobs/", "//h3")

This scrapes all the headers (that is, job posts) from
the OpenNews job board.

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importXML

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 ImportHTML and ImportXML

That's just the basics. You can find plenty of in-depth

tutorials on ImportHTML, ImportXML, and other
formulas like ImportFEED.

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Technique 3
Point-and-Click Apps
OutWit Hub
OutWit Hub is a desktop
app that can identify
each HTML element on a
webpage and scrape it.
The free version lets you
download 100 rows at a
time.

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ParseHub
ParseHub is a desktop
app that can identify and
scrape elements and
sub-elements. The free
version lets you scrape
200 pages at a time.

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WebScraper
WebScraper is a browser
extension that helps you
scrape stuff through the
Web Inspector. It only
sometimes works.

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 Disclaimer:
Free apps come and go.
They may not be up to date when you're reading
this. But that's why we learned the code instead.

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 And that's it!
Find me with questions.
I also recommend my newsletter Tools for
Reporters for cool stuff like this. Good luck!

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