![]() While this method is very powerful and can be used in many places, it requires a bit of understanding about how the web works. With all those great technical options, don’t forget the simple options: often it is worth to spend some time searching for a file with machine-readable data or to call the institution which is holding the data you want. Everyone has done this: you go to a website, see an interesting table and try to copy it over to Excel so you can add some numbers up or store it for later. Yet this often does not really work, or the information you want is spread across a large number of web sites. Copying by hand can quickly become very tedious, so it makes sense to use a bit of code to do it. The advantage of scraping is that you can do it with virtually any web site - from weather forecasts to government spending, even if that site does not have an API for raw data access. Web scrapers are usually small pieces of code written in a programming language such as Python, Ruby or PHP. ![]() Choosing the right language is largely a question of which community you have access to: if there is someone in your newsroom or city already working with one of these languages, then it makes sense to adopt the same language.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |