Data parsing is a fundamental aspect of web scraping and data programming, enabling the extraction and transformation of data from various formats into structured, usable forms. It involves interpreting raw data, such as scraped HTML pages, complex backend JSON responses, or XML sitemaps. All of this has to be parsed and transformed into a format that can be easily analyzed or stored reliably as it can change often.
In web scraping, there are many aspects to data parsing like:
- Parsing scraped HTML documents to extract relevant information using techniques like CSS Selectors or XPath.
- Looking for hidden data in HTML elements like
<script>tags or comments. - Extracting secret values from obfuscated or encoded responses.
- Parsing complex JSON trees from graphql and difficult backend API responses.
With all that there are many brilliant libraries and tools to assist with any data parsing task in the context of web scraping.
See below for more on data parsing in the context of web scraping and data programming 👇
