Web scraping is often discussed in software development circles, but not everyone knows about it or has anything more than a superficial understanding of its ins and outs. With that in mind, here is an overview of the basics, as well as an examination of why some devs are committed to web scraping in a major way.
An Overview of Web Scraping
Web scraping is a method for achieving automatic data extraction from websites. It involves programming a piece of software to visit desired web pages and gather specified information. This may include text content, images, links, or any other type of structured data that resides on these sites.