Selector

What is a Selector?

• The Selector is a mechanism with which you can configure a new scraper or edit an existing scraper.
• With the Selector, you can point and click on the desired data and run ProWebscraper to scrape the data you need.
• You can also modify the configuration in order to add new data fields or clean up other fields within the existing scraper.

 Accessing the Selector

You can access the scraper in two ways. Go to the dashboard and create a new scraper or select an existing scraper to edit it. 

1. To create a new scraper, you can click on ‘Create New Scraper’ (1), enter a URL into the ‘Create Scraper’ Popup, and click ‘Go’.
2. To edit an existing scraper, select that scraper from your list of scrapers and click the ‘Go to Selector’ (2) button.

Elements of Selector

1. URL: This refers to the URL of the page you are right now configuring your scraper with.

2. URL edit: With this, you can replace the current URL with another URL from the same website to configure your scraper. This helps when the current URL is expired. It helps you change the URL.

3. Selector Tab: The Selector loads a copy of the web page with your data columns. This is the tab that you use to configure your scraper.

4. Data Preview Tab: This tab offers a preview of the data you have selected in a table format.

5. Undo/Redo: With this, you can undo/redo your previous edits within a current session.

6. Refresh: You can reload the current webpage.

7. Reset all: It clears the entire configuration, removes all columns and starts from scratch.

8. Add Column: It adds new column to your scraper which you can configure using either Point-and-Click Selector or Manual XPath Selector.

9. JavaScript: It enables or disables JavaScript on the page, disables JavaScript which can make the scraper run faster but there’s a risk of missing data.

10. Data Columns: This displays the columns you have created. You can click/tab into data column titles to rename them.

11. Current Selection Sidebar: Displays the data returned for the current selected column. 

12. Clear Data: Clears the selected data from the current column.

13. Delete Column: Deletes the current column from the scraper.

14. Column Settings: Drop-down menu that contains options to manage the selected column and data within that column.

15. Sample data: Test your scraper by extracting sample data. Use this to check your scraper extracting data properly as you want. 

This will scrape data for Single URL only.  You can check that sample data by downloading it from the scraper tab.

Note: Scrape Sample data for Free, It will not count as page credit.

16. Save: Click to reveal the Save popup and save/update your Scraper.

17. Exit: exit and go to the scraper tab.