Web scraping using XPath and Visual Basic
Informatics, Uncategorized | (3)
More and more web services are popping up. Getting the weather in Paris or the price of a book on Amazon is only a REST, SOAP or XML-RPC call away. Unfortunately, most of the web content being delivered is still intended to be rendered in a browser and the providers of that content haven't included a nice web service API for automated extraction.
Web scraping is a technique for extracting information from websites that don't provide web services. One common way to find the required info on a webpage is to use regular expressions. A much better approach however, is to make use of XPath. ...