The support. The online manuals are very good, though sometimes specific information is hard to find again, and occasionally there are assumptions of knowledge that halfway script-sophisticated people won't have. The amazing thing is, though, that if you don't understand you can ask for help and someone will help you right away.
The interface. Again, it takes a bit of work for a moderately educated halfwit to figure out, but is really very logical for the non-programmer. This is no mean achievement. The built-in Regular Expressions are nice, but I'd love more (and more explanation of what they do!)
The handy little tricks built into the tokens (~@IGNORE@~ ~@nonhtml@~ [1|2|3]*) --I found them only by stumbling across in the middle of an explanation about something else more of these shortcuts, and an easily findable list would be awesome~ --and a better explanation or example of [1|2|3]*
But I just gotta say again: the support is really, really fine.
//repost//
...we recently had a client who want to search medical text references online. They wanted to be able to search for a set of given search terms with corresponding date ranges.
We were able to create a script that read in a CSV with the search terms and date ranges. As it iterated the rows of the CSV it would call RunnableScrapingSession for each row and then dispatch out to each site individually. This created a different scraping session for each search term/site combination. We upped the maximum number of concurrent scraping sessions to 5 or so allowing screen-scraper to gather down rather large amounts of info in less time.
//--//
1) dataSets
2) dataRecords - improved scope would be nice
3) extractData
4) sub-patterns
..
22) Ultra-edit is a good substitute for the text editor (nice to have but not needed)
23) The drag n'drop of the left pane objects into folders is sticky.
Web Data Extraction
what is your favorite feature of screen-scraper?
The support. The online manuals are very good, though sometimes specific information is hard to find again, and occasionally there are assumptions of knowledge that halfway script-sophisticated people won't have. The amazing thing is, though, that if you don't understand you can ask for help and someone will help you right away.
The interface. Again, it takes a bit of work for a moderately educated halfwit to figure out, but is really very logical for the non-programmer. This is no mean achievement. The built-in Regular Expressions are nice, but I'd love more (and more explanation of what they do!)
The handy little tricks built into the tokens (~@IGNORE@~ ~@nonhtml@~ [1|2|3]*) --I found them only by stumbling across in the middle of an explanation about something else more of these shortcuts, and an easily findable list would be awesome~ --and a better explanation or example of [1|2|3]*
But I just gotta say again: the support is really, really fine.
what is your favorite feature of screen-scraper?
RunnableScrapingSessions
//repost//
...we recently had a client who want to search medical text references online. They wanted to be able to search for a set of given search terms with corresponding date ranges.
We were able to create a script that read in a CSV with the search terms and date ranges. As it iterated the rows of the CSV it would call RunnableScrapingSession for each row and then dispatch out to each site individually. This created a different scraping session for each search term/site combination. We upped the maximum number of concurrent scraping sessions to 5 or so allowing screen-scraper to gather down rather large amounts of info in less time.
//--//
Makes you feel powerful :mrgreen:
what is your favorite feature of screen-scraper?
1) dataSets
2) dataRecords - improved scope would be nice
3) extractData
4) sub-patterns
..
22) Ultra-edit is a good substitute for the text editor (nice to have but not needed)
23) The drag n'drop of the left pane objects into folders is sticky.
:idea:
what is your favorite feature of screen-scraper?
I like the apply pattern to last scraped data button, simply because it's quite satisfying when it shows you what you want to see.