Webscraping in C#
What is IronWebScraper?
IronWebScraper is a class library and framework for C# and the .NET programming platform that allows developers to programmatically read websites and extract their content. This is ideal for reverse engineering websites or existing intranets and turning them back into databases or JSON data. It's also useful for downloading large volumes of documents from the internet.
In many respects, IronWebScraper is similar to the Scrapy library for Python, but leverages the advantages of C#, particularly its ability to step through code as the web scraping process is in progress and debug.
Installation
Your first step will be to install IronWebScraper, which you may do from NuGet or by downloading the DLL from our website.
All of the classes you will need can be found in the IronWebScraper namespace.
Popular Use Cases
Migrating Websites to Databases
IronWebScraper provides the tools and methods to allow you to re-engineer your websites back into structured databases. This technology is useful when migrating content from legacy websites and intranets into your new C# application.
Migrating Websites
Being able to easily extract the content of a partial or complete website in C# reduces the time and cost implication in migrating or upgrading website and intranet resources. This can be significantly more efficient than direct SQL transformations, as it flattens the data down to what can be seen on each webpage, and does not require the previous SQL data structures to be understood, nor complex SQL queries to be built.
Populating Search Indexes
IronWebScraper may be pointed at your own website or intranet to read structured data, to read every page, and to extract the correct data so that a search engine within your organization may be populated accurately.
IronWebScraper is an ideal tool to scrape content for your search index. A search application such as IronSearch can read structured content from IronWebScraper to build a powerful enterprise search system.
Using Iron Webscraper
To learn how to use IronWebScraper, it is best to look at examples. This basic example creates a class to scrape titles from a website blog.
using IronWebScraper;
namespace WebScrapingProject
{
class MainClass
{
public static void Main(string [] args)
{
var scraper = new BlogScraper();
scraper.Start();
}
}
class BlogScraper : WebScraper
{
// Initialize scraper settings and make the first request
public override void Init()
{
// Set logging level to show all log messages
this.LoggingLevel = WebScraper.LogLevel.All;
// Request the initial page to start scraping
this.Request("https://ironpdf.com/blog/", Parse);
}
// Method to handle parsing of the page response
public override void Parse(Response response)
{
// Loop through each blog post title link found by CSS selector
foreach (var title_link in response.Css("h2.entry-title a"))
{
// Clean and extract the title text
string strTitle = title_link.TextContentClean;
// Store the extracted title for later use
Scrape(new ScrapedData() { { "Title", strTitle } });
}
// Check if there is a link to the previous post page and if exists, follow it
if (response.CssExists("div.prev-post > a[href]"))
{
// Get the URL for the next page
var next_page = response.Css("div.prev-post > a[href]")[0].Attributes["href"];
// Request the next page to continue scraping
this.Request(next_page, Parse);
}
}
}
}Imports IronWebScraper
Namespace WebScrapingProject
Class MainClass
Public Shared Sub Main(ByVal args As String())
Dim scraper As New BlogScraper()
scraper.Start()
End Sub
End Class
Class BlogScraper
Inherits WebScraper
' Initialize scraper settings and make the first request
Public Overrides Sub Init()
' Set logging level to show all log messages
Me.LoggingLevel = WebScraper.LogLevel.All
' Request the initial page to start scraping
Me.Request("https://ironpdf.com/blog/", AddressOf Parse)
End Sub
' Method to handle parsing of the page response
Public Overrides Sub Parse(ByVal response As Response)
' Loop through each blog post title link found by CSS selector
For Each title_link In response.Css("h2.entry-title a")
' Clean and extract the title text
Dim strTitle As String = title_link.TextContentClean
' Store the extracted title for later use
Scrape(New ScrapedData() From {{"Title", strTitle}})
Next
' Check if there is a link to the previous post page and if exists, follow it
If response.CssExists("div.prev-post > a[href]") Then
' Get the URL for the next page
Dim next_page = response.Css("div.prev-post > a[href]")(0).Attributes("href")
' Request the next page to continue scraping
Me.Request(next_page, AddressOf Parse)
End If
End Sub
End Class
End NamespaceTo scrape a specific website, we will have to create our own class to read that website. This class will extend Web Scraper. We will add some methods to this class, including Init, where we can set initial settings and start the first request, which will then in turn cause a chain reaction where the entire website will be scraped.
We must also add at least one Parse method. Parse methods read webpages which have been downloaded from the internet and use jQuery-like CSS selectors to select content and extract the relevant text and/or images for usage.
Within a Parse method, we may also specify which hyperlinks we wish the crawler to continue to follow and which ones it will ignore.
We may use the Scrape method to extract any data and dump it into a convenient JSON-style file format for later use.
Moving Forward
To learn more about IronWebScraper, we recommend you read the API Reference Documentation, and then start looking at the examples within the tutorial section of our documentation.
The next example we recommend you look at is the C# "blog" webscraping example, where we learn how we might extract the text content from a blog, such as a WordPress blog. This might be very useful in a site migration.
From there, you might go on to look at the other advanced webscraping tutorial examples where we can look at concepts like websites with many different types of pages, e-commerce websites, and also how to use multiple proxies, identities, and logins when scraping data from the internet.
Curtis Chau holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science (Carleton University) and specializes in front-end development with expertise in Node.js, TypeScript, JavaScript, and React. Passionate about crafting intuitive and aesthetically pleasing user interfaces, Curtis enjoys working with modern frameworks and creating well-structured, visually appealing manuals.
