Web scraping, also known as web crawling or web acquisition, is the process of extracting relevant data from web pages on the Internet using automated tools. This process involves using software tools or scripts to simulate the behavior of human browsing web pages, but with faster execution and larger scale. Web scraping tools can parse the HTML code of web pages, extract the required data, such as text, pictures, links, etc., and save them in databases or files for further analysis and use.

Usage scenarios for web scraping

Web scraping is widely used in data collection, search engine optimization, market analysis, price monitoring and other fields, providing enterprises and individuals with a fast and efficient means of data acquisition, thereby helping them make more informed decisions in market competition, academic research, personal life and other aspects.

what tools are needed for it?

There are many web crawling tools available on the market, such as Web Scraper, Octoparse, ParseHub, etc. They provide intuitive and easy-to-use interfaces and rich functions, allowing users to easily define crawling rules and extract required data from target web pages. In addition, there are also some crawling tools based on programming languages, such as BeautifulSoup and Scrapy in Python, which provide more powerful crawling and data processing functions.

How to use a proxy server for web scraping?

The method of using a proxy to crawl web pages mainly includes the following steps: ‌

1. Get a proxy

The proxy is usually provided by a third-party service provider. You can find available proxies through search engines or related technical forums. ‌
Before using it, it is best to test the availability of the proxy. ‌

2. Set up the web scraper ‌

Open the web scraper tool and find the setting option, which can usually be found in the tool's option menu. ‌
In the setting option, find the setting option for the proxy. ‌

3. Configure the proxy

Select the proxy setting and enter the obtained IP address and port number. ‌
Different web scraper may have different settings. For specific operations, please refer to relevant documents or tutorials. ‌

4. Run the web scraper

After setting up the proxy, run the program and start web scraping. ‌
At this time, the web scraper will access through the set proxy, thereby hiding the real IP address.

Example of using a proxy to scrap web pages

Source code example of using a proxy to scrap web page. Here, Python is used as an example. The requestslibrary is used to scrap web page through a proxy server. ‌
First, make sure you have installed the requestslibrary. If not, you can install it through pip:
pip install requests
You can then use the following Python code to scrap the web through the proxy server:

import requests 

# Set the IP address and port number obtained by swiftproxy 
proxies = { 
 'http': 'http://IP address:port', 
'http': 'http://IP address:port', 
} 

# URL of the target page  
url = 'http://example.com' 

# use a proxy server for web scraping 
response = requests.get(url, proxies=proxies)  


# Print the source code of the web page 
print(response.text) 

Replace the IP address and port number in the above code with the IP address and port number of your actual proxy server, and then replace http://example.com with the URL of the web page you want to scrap. After running the code, it will crawl the web page through the proxy server and print out the source code of the web page.