Modern web browsers are equipped with a unique set of tools known as Developer Tools, or devtools, specifically designed for web developers. For those seeking to enhance their web scraping endeavors, leveraging a web scraping API can be a game-changer. Offering a sophisticated solution that simplifies the extraction of web data, it ensures efficiency and effectiveness in your web scraping projects, allowing you to focus on analysis and insights rather than the intricacies of data collection.
These tools are instrumental in web scraper development, aiding in debugging and understanding the functionality of target websites.
Devtools can be activated on any website by pressing the F12 key or by right-clicking anywhere on the page and selecting the “inspect” option.
For instance, the “Elements” tab allows for the inspection of the final HTML structure of the page. This feature can be utilized to create CSS and XPath selectors for scraping:
The “Network” tab, also known as the Network Inspector, enables the inspection of the page’s network traffic. This feature can be used to comprehend the website’s operation and uncover its backend and hidden APIs:
One of the most utilized features of Network devtools is the capability to export the requests to cURL commands (right click -> copy as curl) that can be transformed into scraping code using tools like curlconverter.