Screen scraping software that will traverse pages
- by nilbus
We're creating a mashup site that pulls information from many sources all over the web. Many of these sites don't provide RSS feeds or APIs to access the information they provide. This leaves us with screen scraping as our method for collecting the data.
There are many scripting tools out there written in different scripting languages for screen scraping that require you to write scraping scripts in the language the scraper was written in. Scrapy, scrAPI, and scrubyt are a few written in Ruby and Python.
There are other web-based tools I've seen like Dapper that create XML or RSS feeds based on a webpage. It has a beautiful web-based interface that requires no scripting skills to use. This would be a great tool, if it were able to traverse multiple pages to gather data from hundreds pages of results.
We need something that will scrape information from paginated web sites, much like scrubyt, but with a user interface that a non-programmer could use. We'll script up our own solution if we need to, probably using scrubyt, but if there's a better solution out there, we want to use it. Does anything like this exist?
