Scraping GIF digits
I'm trying to scrape prices from a site, but they've replaced the text digits with gif images of the text, and its not always the same file for the same digit. I presume this is to prevent scraping.
Any tips to get around this ?
Cheers
We've seen the same thing
We've seen the same thing sometimes. If they know what they are doing, they don't have an "alt" tag. Sometimes the best thing to do is complain the the webmaster that the page is unfriendly to visually impaired browsers and in violation of the ADA.
Sometimes is you change your user agent (http://community.screen-scraper.com/API/setUserAgent) to be a googlebot, they show they prices as text as they want Google to index those prices, but that doesn't work often.
In some cases we've had to find an OCR to read such images, and though it's a bother to set up, it usually works.