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Semalt Explains How To Extract The Data Needed From HTML Websites

A large amount of information presented in the net is considered to be "unstructured" because it is not organized properly. HTML websites are different in the way that they contain organized documents, and the text presented in the documents is structured within the underlying HTML code.

There are three main data extraction methods from HTML websites:

  • Saving the text contained on a web page to your computer;
  • Writing the code for data extraction;
  • Using special extraction tools;

1. How to extract HTML from the website without coding

You can scrape a web page content using the steps described below:

Extracting text only

After opening a webpage containing the text you want, right click and select the "Save Page As," or "Save As" option. Type a name for the file in the "File Name" field and from the "Save As Type" drop-down menu, choose "Web Page, HTML only." Click the "Save" button and wait a few seconds.

All the text on that page is extracted and saved as an HTML file. The original page-formatting options remain intact, and you can edit the content in such text editors as Notepad.

Extracting an entire webpage

Select "Save as" or "Save Page As" option in the "File" menu. Then, click "Web Page, Complete" from the "Save as Type" drop-down menu. After clicking "Save," the text and images will be extracted from the page and saved wherever you want. The text is placed in an HTML file while the images are stored in a folder.

2. Extracting HTML from a website using coding

You can work directly with HTML files using special tools. Also, you can create a code to remove all HTML tags and retain text contained in HTML files using XPath or regular expression. Some of the most popular programming languages for this task include Python, Java, JS, Go, PHP and NodeJs.

3. Using web data extraction tools

If you just want to extract HTML files from a website without writing a single line of code or avoids the torture of the copy and paste method, use web scraping tools. In fact, there are a lot of helpful tools that can harvest the necessary information from a website and then convert it into the structured format. Just try a few scraping tools, and you'll definitely find the one that is the most appropriate for your scrapping needs.