There are many challenges one has to face when it comes to web scraping. One of the most prevalent is dealing with the vast amounts of data that websites can contain. That’s why it’s crucial to have powerful tools that can effectively navigate through the complex structures of websites and extract the data you need.
In this article, we’ll discuss three different options for filtering and ignoring website content when performing web scraping. These options can save a lot of time and effort that would otherwise be spent sifting through irrelevant data. All three are already available in our WebsiteDownloader tool.
1. option – Enter the url of a desired subsection of a webpage
Our tool allows you to download only specific subpages from a website. For instance, you may have agreed with a client to download only the blog content found on the blog subpages. To do so, simply enter the full link to the blog into the input field, and the program will begin its search from the blog subpage onwards.
Example: https://www.leemeta-translations.co.uk/blog
The program will scan the content of the subpages.
2. option – Aditional options – Subpages to skip
Alternatively, you may want to download the entire website except for certain subpages. In this case, the tool’s homepage features a new option called “Additional options -> Subpages to skip” where you can specify the subpages you don’t want the program to scan. For example, you can set the program to ignore all links that contain the word “blog” or “2023/01/24”.
This feature is also very useful when dealing with links or subpages generated programmatically, which is typical for online stores that aim to provide an easy product search experience.
Examples of links: (/?wishlist-action&lang=en,sort_by_price=desc).
