Today, many applications need data to come to life and test them successfully. The importance of data in the world of technology is very important. The simplest way for businesses to obtain data is through web scraping. With the best web scraping, applications can get the data they need from their target websites. It can even automate web scraping processes and regularly provide a stream of data to the application, resulting in a very powerful dataset.
There are also many methods for performing web scraping. Web scraping can be done with many different approaches. While these web scraping methods have pros and cons over each other, they basically serve the same purpose. Here are some popular options:
- Writing your own web scraping code.
- Using APIs that provide web scraping services.
- Using browser web scraping extensions.
Among these options, the most popular method for developers and application owners is the use of APIs that provide web scraping services. Web scraping APIs provide many conveniences to developers. Let’s talk about that.
Best way for web scraping: Web scraping API
Web scraping APIs are the most preferred method in web scraping processes. Web scraping APIs are responsible for fetching data of targeted web addresses to applications.
Applications extract data from websites quite effortlessly using web scraping APIs. Web scraping processes take no responsibility to deal with any issues. The web scraping API takes care of proxy setting, IP pooling, data accuracy and more.
With the integration of the web scraping API into applications, data scraping from websites can be easily automated. If no web scraping APIs were used, it would be necessary to periodically update IP addresses and set proxy settings. The web scraping API automates processes and ensures the fastest data flow.
There are some considerations when choosing a web scraping API. Web scraping APIs should automatically adjust settings such as IP address and location so that they can be automated for applications. There are many paid and free APIs that offer web scraping nowadays. Among these APIs is zenscrape, which has around 10,000 clients. Let’s take a look at the features that zenscrape provides.
Zenscrape API
The best method of web scraping is to use the web scraping API. zenscrape provides a capable and powerful API that offers web scraping.
With the zenscrape API, it allows you to obtain data from target websites in just seconds. It has automated proxy settings and a fairly large IP pool. The accuracy of the engraved data is high.
Zenscrape API has flexible and affordable packages. It also offers a free package option. Detailed package information can be found here.
To try the Zenscrape API, let’s get a package and get an API key. After obtaining the API key, let’s prepare the following sample cURL request. We will write the API key we have obtained in the API key field.
| curl “https://app.zenscrape.com/api/v1/get?url=http://httpbin.org/ip” \ -H “apikey: YOUR-APIKEY” |
When we run this request, we get the following response.
| <html> <head> </head> <body> <pre style=”word-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;”> { “origin”: “80.102.66.13” } </pre> </body> </html> |
Zenscrape API is a very flexible service. It enables data customization and queries with the parameters it receives. It enables applications to easily access target data in web data scraping. The table below shows the parameters that can be used in the zenscrape API. This table is taken from the powerful and detailed documentation provided by zenscrape.
| Parameter | Type | Description |
| url | required | target site you want to scrape |
| premium | optional, boolean, counts as 20 credits towards your quota | Uses residential proxies, unlocks sites that are hard to scrape |
| location | optional, default: worldwide | if premium=false possible locations are ‘na’ (North America) and ‘eu’ (Europe)if premium=true you can choose a location from our list of 230+ countries |
| keep_headers | optional, boolean | Allows to pass through forward headers (e.g. user agents, cookies) |
| device_type | optional, boolean | By default, a desktop user agent is set. When set to ‘mobile’, it will be set to an iPhone or Android user agent |
| render | optional, boolean, counts as 5 credits towards your quota | Use a headless browser to fetch content that relies on javascript |
| wait_for | optional, integer | Max value: 15, only works together with render=true amount of seconds that a browser waits for content to render before it scrapes the HTML markup |
| wait_for_css | optional, integer | Only works together with render=true, waits until the css-selector becomes visible |
| session | optional, string | a random string if you want to reuse an IP, for example session=kdQ1VeQE |
| scroll_to_bottom | optional, boolean | Only works together with render=true, scrolls to bottom of page before returning the page content |
Conclusion
The most popular way to perform web scraping is to use the web scraping API. The web scraping API provides automation and speed to applications. If you want to achieve your data needs in the fastest and most perfect way, discover the zenscrape API.
