Visual Web Ripper is full of unique and powerful features that will allow you to extract content from web sites where other web content extractor software fail.
We have listed some of the most important features here.
Our web content extractor has a visual editor to define projects and templates. You use a mouse to click on the content you want to collect, so no coding is required.
Our web content extractor can automatically walk through whole web sites and collect complete content structures such as product catalogues or search results
Our web content extractor can walk through a website just as you would when using a normal Internet browser, so AJAX and other javascripts are fully supported.
Our software has a fast multi-threaded data collector for web sites where AJAX is not required for data extraction.
You can repeatedly submit forms for all possible combinations of input values in dropdown boxes, or you can supply a list of input values by yourself.
You can supply parameter data from a database, such as form input values or URLs that should be visited.
You can extract website data from most framesets and iframes with our web content grabber.
Semi-automatic data extraction from web sites using CAPTCHA protection.
Duplicate data detection can be used to extract only new data.
You can extract website data anonymously. A list of anonymous proxy servers can be setup to hide your IP-address and facillitate anonymous web scraping.
You can schedule content extraction to keep data up-to-date. The scheduler includes email notification, logging and status screens.
Advanced selection techniques make project templates more resistant to structural changes on web pages, so a scheduled project can keep collecting data even if the structure of a webpage changes slightly.
Email notifications can be sent out if the structure of a webpage changes so significantly that you must modify the scheduled project in order for our web content grabber to continue extracting content from the webpage.
Unique features allow you to extract website data from web pages with an unstructured "flow" of content. Most other web data extraction tools are unable to extract data from such web pages.
You can collect many different types of data with our web content grabber, such as text, links, images, files, meta tags, tag attributes and many more.
Our web content grabber supports AJAX and other javascripts, so now you can collect content from all these cool websites that are fully AJAX enabled.
You can run data extraction projects from the command line.
You can extract website data to databases, spreadsheets, XML or CSV files. You can also save the data in an internal memory structure that can be used in conjunction with the API.
Custom scripting in C#, VB.NET or Regex allows transformation of content as it is being extracted.
You can use custom post-processing modules (.NET assemblies or scripts) to post-process data after it has been extracted. Custom modules are automatically triggered after a project has run.
Our web content extractor software includes a powerful API. You can use the API to modify and run projects from within your own applications, or use the API in conjunction with a post-processing module to easily post-process collected data.
The Visual Web Ripper installer package includes examples showing how to build custom post-processing modules and how to use the API.