Smart CSS Selectors

By |2019-03-04T16:37:21+02:00October 13th, 2014|Web Scraping|0 Comments

Our web scraping business requires that we develop scraper robots quickly and efficiently. We can offer competitive pricing only if we are most efficient at creating robots for each source. Old saying “time is money” means a lot here and we always look for ways to do things better and faster.

In scraper development process everyone uses either Xpaths or CSS selectors to parse DOM for data to be extracted or links to crawl through. One can inspect DOM elements (via Google Chrome) for classes, IDs or other attributes. Then solve a small or big puzzle to write a selector. It requires knowing powerful CSS Selector syntax, detective work inside DOM, and some trial and error.

There is a nifty tool […]