There are endless reasons that we would like to use a particular data from different kinds of webpages across the web, but we do not actually know how to use that specific data, for our personal purposes, especially with the lack of an appropriate API.

Luckily for us, there is a great and quite simple solution out there, without the use of any APIs, called Web Scraping.

In this tutorial, I’ll cover all the basic information to get relevant information and data off the web and into your (figurative) hands, by scraping the web using Node.js, Express, Axios, and Cheerio.

Wait, What Is Web Scraping Anyway?

Web scraping is a wonderful technique that allows us to pull data straight out of a webpage’s HTML, without the use of a formal API what so ever.

There is a bunch of different ways to scrape the web, and it is possible to do so through programming languages such as JavaScript or Python, and libraries such as Cheerio, Soup, and Puppeteer.

The Whole Process In 3 Steps

The whole process of web scraping can be explained through three simple steps:

1. The very first step is to understand and find the corresponding HTML tags of the data you want to scrape from a specific webpage.
2. To do so, you’ll need to inspect the very same webpage’s HTML code (using for example — Chrome DevTool) and find those HTML tags.
3. The second step is to choose the programming language you would like to code with, and the corresponding libraries for your web scraping application, in our case — Node.js, Express, and Cheerio, and scraping the data by setting the same HTML tags from the first step we have mentioned before.
4. The last step is to receive the desire data from a webpage (i.e. through Axios request), as we did in the second step, load it through the Cheerio library, and use it as you wish.

#nodejs #web-development #web-scraping #javascript