Troubleshooting
How do I resolve connection issues when trying to scrape a site that uses SSL?
SSL issues can be manifest as a number of errors including but not limited to:
If you make a request and get one of these errors, the best steps to rectify it are
- Make sure you are using the newest version of screen-scraper
My update was cancelled prematurely. How do I restore screen-scraper?
From within the workbench, if when prompted you agreed to download an update, and for some reason the update download stopped prematurely then the next time you try to run screen-scraper it may fail. Instead an error window will appear containing a java.lang.ClassNotFoundException error.
I've just upgraded to an alpha version of screen-scraper, but it has bugs. How to I downgrade back to a more stable version?
We try our best to make even the alpha versions usable, but invariably bugs will slip by us once in a while. If you'd like to downgrade back to a previous version of screen-scraper, follow these steps:
I'm getting an exception that says something like "Too many files open." How do I fix this?
When running screen-scraper on Unix-based systems, if several scraping sessions are executing simultaneously, you may see exceptions in log files indicating that too many files are open. The easiest way to fix this is to simply increase the maximum number of allowed open files. Depending on the operating system and/or Linux distribution you're running, there are several ways you might go about this. Here are the ones we've found (note that 65535 refers to the maximum number of open files--you can set it to whatever you'd like):
I've changed the ports, but I still get an error message about port binding. Why?
When it comes down to it there has got to be some other program preventing screen-scraper from bidning. Such as:
McAfee anti-Virus (or some other flavor of software)
Zone Alarm and other internet traffic monitors.
These programs are fine to run while running screen-scraper as long as screen-scraper is added to the white list. Most of these programs are going to hold a list of applications which are allowed to make outward calls to the internet and screen-scraper needs to be added.
How do I update a script whose "Overwrite this script on import" box is unchecked when screen-scraper is on a GUI-less server?
Follow the instructions found here on our Using Scripts page.
How do I transfer my scraping sessions and other objects from one machine to another?
See the Importing and Exporting Objects page for instructions on this.
When I export my scraping session I get a zero-byte file. What am I doing wrong?
This is most likely because the character set you're currently using is set to something screen-scraper's file exporter can't deal with. We're working on a fix for this, but in the meantime try changing the "Default character set" in the "Settings" dialog box to "UTF-8".
When I try to connect to the screen-scraper server from my application it refuses connections. How do I fix this?
screen-scraper can deny access to external applications when you're running a proxy session, accessing it in server mode, connecting via the SOAP protocol, or accessing the web interface. Only external applications originating from specific IP addresses are allowed to connect. If screen-scraper is denying access, see below for possible reasons and remedies.
screen-scraper is telling me that it can't bind to certain ports. How do I fix this?
This error is caused by two possible scenarios.