Home » Forums » screen-scraper » screen-scraper public support

Someone pls suggest how to modify the attached SSS file to automate snatching records from all categories on YellowPages.com

Attached is a working SSS file that can be used to snatch useful fields of data from records appearing on YellowPages.com in Thomasville, NC listing nearly 180 Thomasville-area Auto Repair Service companies that lie within a 10-mile radius of that town.

I don't know how to automate the process of going through the list of all the available categories offered by YellowPages.com to snatch all the company records. But with Tyler's & Scott's help, I did perfect a method for snatching all those in the Auto Repair Service category. I think a number of sales organizations could benefit from having a list of local businesses they could import into their contact management database or spreadsheet. You may find you could sell a list to someone in Cincinatti, or Boston, or Sacramento, Miami, Houston, Atlanta, etc. If you could create it quickly and provide it, your customer would have a working list that is much more useful than that your customer could access himself right there on the YP.com site. He can save it, and write to it, editing existing data as well as adding new information. He could keep accurate, readily accessible notes on his conversations with contacts and other pertinent information.

Also attached is a list of the scraped records so you can see their data fields.

Mike H, [gageasebrkr] [at] [GMail] [dot] [com]

Attachments: SSSFile.txt (rename to YellowPages.sss & import)
YPoutput.txt

Attachment Size
YPoutput.txt 19.37 KB
SSSFile.txt 12.24 KB
‹ Where do I find the token properties "advanced" tab? What if the extractor pattern changes somewhere down the list of records being scraped? ›
MikeSpike on 07/10/2010 at 5:53 pm

Mike, I do know of someone

Mike,

I do know of someone who is scraping to get lists of company locations: http://www.aggdata.com/

I'm not sure what you're asking for here. Your scrape has one scrapable file that is hard-coded to the one category. You might want to request a page previous to that that lists the categories, scrape the links, then pass those to a page like the one you have that will navigate to the scraped category rather than a hard-coded one.

 jason on 07/12/2010 at 9:12 am