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How to scrape HTML data from web pages using Jsoup
This is a user generated content for MyStory, a YourStory initiative to enable its community to contribute and have their voices heard. The views and writings here reflect that of the author and not of YourStory.
In the content marketing industry, web scraping has become a daily routine for bloggers, online marketers, and webmasters. Financial marketers rely on data from the web to track down the performance of commodities in the stock markets, not to mention market analysis.
The web is the most significant source of accurate, clean and consistent information. What you need is a technique that can collect, analyze, and organize data from the web in a scalable way. This is where web content extraction comes in. Web content extraction is the ultimate solution to scraping HTML data from your target web pages.
Also known as web scraping, web content extraction is a technique of extracting information from the web in vast amounts and presenting it in formats that can easily be used. To scrape HTML data from the target web pages, you can hire web data extraction services or use your local machine to scrape target web pages. Note that data extraction services are highly recommended for extensive web scraping projects.
Why to choose Jsoup?
Jsoup is a Java library with convenient Application Programming Interface (API) to extract and retrieve HTML data from web pages. This library uses high-quality methods such as CSS and DOM. Jsoup library parses HTML data to the same Document Object Model (DOM) as Google Chrome browser and Mozilla Firefox.
Jsoup is a user-friendly HTML parser that delivers the desired web scraping results. Jsoup classes provide methods of loading and scraping HTML data from single or multiple sources. Here is a list of tasks you can execute with a Jsoup Java-based library.
Find and extract important information using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) selectors or DOM traversal
Clean end-users content against a secure white-list to prevent Cross-site Scripting (XSS) attacks
Scrape and parse HTML data from a file, string, or URL
Output semi-structured HTML data
Manipulate text, attributes, and HTML elements
Extracting data from URLs using Jsoup
Also known as Metadata description, Meta information comprises of useful data utilized by search engines to determine and identify the content of web pages for indexing reasons. In most cases, Meta descriptions are designed in the form of tags in the head section of an HTML web page. Jsoup library is widely used by webmasters to scrape HTML data to determine the content of a web page.
With Jsoup, you don't have to worry about getting useful data in usable formats. This HTML parse comprises of a whitelist sanitizer that expects HTML content in the form of String and returns the content to end users as clean HTML data.
The whitelist sanitizer parses the input HTML in a safe and secure environment and then iterates the content through a parse tree. Note that Jsoup is a Java-based library that does not use regular expressions to parse HTML data from web pages.
Jsoup library provides a very convenient API for manipulating and extracting useful data from both URL and HTML files. Install Jsoup library on your machine and quickly load HTML document, print total internal links of an URL with text, and scrape HTML data from web pages without experiencing technical challenges.