Techniques

Web Scraping

Automatically extracting data from websites using code, turning web pages into structured data you can use in your apps or workflows.

What is Web Scraping?

Web scraping is the process of using code to automatically extract data from websites and convert it into a structured format like JSON or CSV.

Instead of manually copying and pasting information, you write scripts (usually in Python) that visit web pages, parse the HTML, and pull out the specific data you need.

Most builders use it to gather competitive intelligence, build datasets for AI training, monitor price changes, or aggregate content from multiple sources. Popular tools include Beautiful Soup, Scrapy, and Playwright for JavaScript-heavy sites.

Always check a site's robots.txt and terms of service. Some sites explicitly prohibit scraping, while others offer official APIs that are more reliable and ethical to use.

Good to Know

Automates data collection from websites that don't offer APIs
Python libraries like Beautiful Soup and Scrapy are the most common tools
Playwright or Puppeteer handle JavaScript-heavy sites that load content dynamically
Always respect robots.txt and rate limits to avoid getting blocked
Many sites offer official APIs that are more reliable than scraping

How Vibe Coders Use Web Scraping

1
Building a dataset of 10,000 product listings to train a recommendation model
2
Monitoring competitor pricing across 50 e-commerce sites every day
3
Pulling job listings from multiple boards into one database for your job search app
4
Extracting restaurant reviews and ratings to analyze sentiment trends

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Terms

Crawling

The automated process where search engine bots discover and scan web pages by following links across the internet.

Playwright

Microsoft's open-source framework for automated browser testing across Chrome, Firefox, and Safari with one API.

Puppeteer

A Node.js library that lets you control Chrome or Firefox programmatically to automate browser tasks, scrape websites, and test web apps.

Apify

A cloud platform for web scraping and automation that lets you extract data from any website using pre-built scrapers or custom code.

Parsing

Breaking down text or code into structured pieces a computer can understand and work with.

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