Web Scraping with JavaScript

Web scraping is something I considered back when I was working with Python and found out about BeautifulSoup and Scrapy. When a website doesn't have a way to request/retrieve information programmatically (like with an API), an alternative way of "requesting" the data is by scraping it, or collecting it by using a program or script. There are legal considerations when it comes to web scraping, so I'll start this off by sharing a video about that:

The latest information about the legality of web scraping based on a court decision is "any data that is publicly available and not copyrighted is fair game for web crawlers":

Now that you've watched and read that, here's a video that explains what web scraping is:

Here's some more detailed info from Wikipedia.

Okay, so now you know what you're legally able to scrape and what web scraping is. So how do you do it with JavaScript? I've done a bit of searching and put together a list of resources that show you how. Here they are, articles and videos listed from newest (June 2020) to oldest (January 2017):

Guide to Web Scraping with JavaScript

Keep in mind that older resources means older info and methods that might not work with today's technologies, but they still offer an insight into the "how to" of web scraping with JavaScript.

Thanks for checking out this post!