Web Scraping with Shell Scripts

Introduction to Web Scraping

Web scraping involves extracting data from websites. Shell scripts can be used for simple scraping tasks by fetching and processing HTML content from web pages.

Using cURL for Web Scraping

cURL is a powerful tool for fetching web pages and extracting content. Here’s how you can use it for basic web scraping:

Fetching HTML Content

#!/bin/bash

# Fetch HTML content from a website
URL="https://example.com"

html=$(curl -s "$URL")
echo "$html"
                

This script retrieves the HTML content of https://example.com and stores it in a variable html.

Extracting Specific Data

You can use tools like grep and sed to extract specific data from the HTML:

#!/bin/bash

# Extract specific data from HTML using grep and sed
URL="https://example.com"

html=$(curl -s "$URL")
title=$(echo "$html" | grep -o '' | sed 's/<[^>]*>//g')

echo "Title of the webpage: $title"
                

This script extracts the title of the webpage from its HTML content.

Handling Dynamic Content

For websites with dynamic content loaded via JavaScript, consider using tools like puppeteer or wget with additional options for simulating a browser environment.

Conclusion

Shell scripting provides a straightforward approach to perform basic web scraping tasks. For more complex scenarios involving JavaScript-driven pages, consider using specialized tools or libraries tailored for web scraping.