🛠️ Create a Selector for Scraping

• Data Inputs

  • query
    • Pass a Css selector defining which part of the HTML to extract
    • Useful Links to learn about CSS Selectors
      • Basic Tutorial on Selectors: https://pushpinder.hashnode.dev/css-selectors-101
      • Advanced Tutorial on Selectors: https://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/the-30-css-selectors-you-must-memorize--net-16048
      • Translate Selectors in English to understand what they mean: https://kittygiraudel.github.io/selectors-explained/?s=.titleline%2520a%253Afirst-chil

  • type

    The 5 dropdown values in Create a Selector:

    • Text: Used to get text value of any element and it's children.
    • Attribute: If you choose attribute you need to provide property value. Used to get value of an attribute inside an element like https://asdas.com">, has attribute with a property href.
    • Data: If you choose attribute you need to provide property value. Used to get value of a data attribute inside an element like
      , has a data attribute with property name.
    • Html: Returns the full HTML, needed only for rare cases.
    • Value: Returns the value inside a form input. Very rare.

    First 3 are most often used and the key skill is coming up with the right selectors.

  • property

    • In case of Attribute and Data type, you need to define the property, which tells the block which property to extract.
    • For example:
      • An element like https://asdas.com">, has type as “attribute” with a property as “href”.
      • An element like
        , has type as “data” with the property as “name”.
  • save as
    • Give a name that you want to save the values extracted using this selector.
    • The scraped data will be saved under this name.
  • is list
    • Boolean value determines if the data you are selecting occurs once on the page or more than once.
    • Set this to true, if there are multiple values of the data you are trying to extract.
      • Example: Names of all articles on a news listing or Price of all hotels on booking.com page.
    • Set this to false, if there is only 1 value of the data on the page.
      • Example: Title of the page or heading of an article
  • selectors
    • This is used to chain selectors one after the other
    • More often than not, you would want to get multiple data values from the same page, so you can create multiple instances of Create a Selector for Scraping block.
    • Then connect the output selectors to input selectors of these blocks to create a list of selectors.
    • Then when all the selectors have been created you can pass the final block’s selectors value to the Scrape a Page block

• Data Outputs

  • selector
    • Contains an object representing the selector created
  • selectors
    • Contains the list of all selectors chained till now
    • The current selector created is added to the selectors list
    • If selectors input was empty, the selectors output will contain 1 selector object for this block.