ChatGPT Web Scraping in 2024 and How to Get Code Interpreter ChatGPT

ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM) generative artificial intelligence (AI) software. The ChatGPT chatbot can communicate with you and respond to prompts, which are directions or questions you provide. ChatGPT can be helpful in many ways, including helping you with productivity, writing, coding, and math, among other areas. You can even get Code Interpreter for ChatGPT to help you interpret code. ChatGPT can provide you with computer programs that can help you with automating tasks, making your work faster and more efficient. You can also scrape websites with ChatGPT web scraping.

What Is ChatGPT Web Scraping?

ChatGPT, which stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is a powerful piece of software that was unveiled in 2022 by the company OpenAI that allows users to converse with a computer program that can mimic natural human language. The chatbot can hold conversations and remember references from earlier in the session to provide a user with a helpful, human-like response to each prompt.

ChatGPT can be useful in many ways:

• Users can get solutions to problems of all sorts in their businesses or their daily lives.
• Writers and bloggers can use it for SEO strategies, blog post ideas, complete blog posts, and drafts for any other kind of writing project.
• Data scientists and students can use the computational power of ChatGPT to analyze data sets as well as CSV files and images (ChatGPT 4.0 plan).
• Developers can use it for quick and easy debugging of their programs.
• Companies can power their chatbots with the ChatGPT application programming interface (API).
• ChatGPT web scraping: Companies can use ChatGPT to scrape websites for price tracking, sentiment analysis, or competitor research.
• Developers can use the chatbot to debug code for programs, including web scraping programs.
• Code Interpreter ChatGPT: a debugging plug-in in testing that can help debug your code and provide cleaner code.

Can ChatGPT scrape websites by itself on the OpenAI website? While ChatGPT can provide you with the code, debug any errors, and help you categorize and store the scraped data, it will not be doing the web scraping itself. Instead, ChatGPT can provide you with the complete code to write your program, answer any questions you have about the web scraping process, and help you analyze the data that you scrape.

ChatGPT web scraping can make the web scraping process much easier because it can provide you with the code and debug any errors you may run into. If you have the ChatGPT Pro plan, you can sign up to use Code Interpreter ChatGPT, which may be able to help you scrape the web even more efficiently with better code. Code Interpreter ChatGPT can also solve advanced math problems and handle data visualization.

Web Scraping With ChatGPT

ChatGPT web scraping involves developing a plan to scrape certain websites for data and instructing the chatbot to provide a program that will allow you to carry out that web scraping plan efficiently. This assumes you will have the tools needed to scrape the web, including some knowledge of a programming language like Python, an integrated development environment like Visual Studio Code, and an idea of what kind of data you want to scrape and for what purposes.

How to get started with ChatGPT web scraping

Getting started with ChatGPT web scraping is easy. Go to the OpenAI website and create an account. If you already have an account, you can click on “Try ChatGPT” on the OpenAI home page or navigate to the ChatGPT page to start chatting with the chatbot.

The ChatGPT 3.5 model is currently free to use, with some limitations, such as a cap on the number of messages per hour. The ChatGPT Plus, which uses the GPT-4 model, is currently $20 monthly and has some advanced features. If you go over the message limit with ChatGPT Plus, you revert to GPT-3.5. Using GPT-3.5 will suffice for the web scraper ChatGPT examples in this article.

Once you open an OpenAI account and navigate to the ChatGPT interface, you can ask the chatbot questions about ChatGPT web scraping. Consider including as much information as possible in your prompts to get the most out of your interaction with the chatbot. In the example below, instead of simply asking for a ChatGPT web scraping program, you can input a detailed prompt that asks for a web-scraping program written in Python that uses the Requests and Beautiful Soup libraries to find all of the instances of specific text on specified websites.

Depending on your query, you can engineer your prompts by instructing the chatbot to respond in ways you want it to respond. In the example below, details are provided to ChatGPT about the website to be scraped, the CSS paths of the elements on the website to be scraped, comments throughout the code explaining what the code does, and instructions on what to do with the data afterward.

After receiving a response, you can hit “regenerate” to generate a new response if you are not satisfied with the program provided or any other part of the chatbot’s answer. You can also ask follow-up questions. For example, if you do not understand part of the ChatGPT web scraping program, ask the chatbot, and it will attempt to help you understand it.

Steps for ChatGPT web scraping

This section will serve as a tutorial on how to use ChatGPT to help you scrape the contents of a website. Your use case may differ, and the HTML and CSS elements of the website you want to scrape will differ from the example in this article. For that reason, the exact program in this article will not work on any other website than for the website in this example. Take the steps below to get started with ChatGPT web scraping.

Develop your ChatGPT web scraping plan

Write down a plan that includes your goals for web scraping. What kind of data do you want to collect? That data could be product prices, news headlines, social media comments, or any other type of specific data to be used for your purposes. Consider also what you want to do with the data. You may want to save the data to spreadsheets, which you can analyze later.

If you know what kind of data you want to scrape, choose a website containing that data and note the URL. You must also know the HTML or CSS identification tags for each website element you want to scrape.

Navigate to the sites you’ll use for ChatGPT web scraping

You’ll need to find the data on the websites you want to scrape, along with the CSS tags associated with that data:

1. Navigate to the site.
2. Find the elements on the page that you want to scrape.
3. Right-click the element and choose “Inspect.”
4. In the Inspector pane of the development tools, you will find the text of the relevant item. For example, you may find the name of the product.
5. Right-click that text and choose Copy > CSS Path.
6. Save the CSS Path of the item you want to scrape.

Write your ChatGPT web scraping prompt

If you have the URL of the site to be scraped and the CSS path of the data you want to scrape, you can provide that information to ChatGPT to give you a program. In this example, you want the output to be a Python program with all of the relevant details included, such as the URL, the CSS path, and proxy server information.

For this example, quotes from the website https://quotes.toscrape.com/ are being scraped to compile quotes for an article. If you don’t know how to write Python code, ChatGPT will be able to help you. You can write your prompt similar to this prompt:

I need a Python script for a web scraping program that will scrape the quotes of a website using the Requests and Beautiful Soup libraries. I want to save the contents of each quote to a CSV file that will be saved on my local machine with the Windows operating system. I will be running the program with Visual Studio Code with the Python extension.

The URL of the website to scrape is:

https://quotes.toscrape.com

The pagination style is as follows:

https://quotes.toscrape.com/page/2/

I need to scrape the contents with this CSS path:

html body div.container div.row div.col-md-8 div.quote span.text

I need the quotes from each page to be scraped. The ChatGPT web scraping program should continue for as many pages that exist to that URL. When there are no more quotes, the message “No quotes found!” will appear on the page.

Be sure to include comments before each line of code explaining what the code does and comments explaining any placeholder text that needs to be changed by me. Let me know if any part of this prompt is unclear.

The prompt provides the instructions and asks the chatbot if anything is unclear due to any mistakes you may have made in the prompt.

Use the code from the response to scrape the web 

This is what a response from the default GPT-3.5 may look like:

Certainly! Here’s a Python script that uses the Requests and Beautiful Soup libraries to scrape quotes from the website “https://quotes.toscrape.com” and saves them to a CSV file on your Windows machine using Visual Studio Code:

#ChatGPT web scraping program for Code Interpreter ChatGPT article

import requests

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

import csv

import time  # Import the time module for adding a delay

# Define the URL of the website to scrape

base_url = “https://quotes.toscrape.com”

page_num = 1

quotes = []

# Loop through pages until there are no more pages

while True:

print(f”Scraping page {page_num}…”)  # Print the page that is being scraped

# Construct the URL for the current page

url = f”{base_url}/page/{page_num}/”

# Send a GET request to the URL

response = requests.get(url)

# Check if the page exists or if the “No quotes found!” message is on the page

if response.status_code != 200 or “No quotes found!” in response.text:

print(f”Finished scraping. Either page {page_num} does not exist or ‘No quotes found!’ was detected.”)

break

# Parse the HTML content of the page using Beautiful Soup

soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, “html.parser”)

# Find all the quotes on the page

quote_elements = soup.select(“.quote > .text”)

# Check if any quotes are found

if not quote_elements:

print(f”No quotes found on page {page_num}. Ending the ChatGPT web scraping.”)

break

# Extract the text of each quote and append it to the quotes list

for quote_element in quote_elements:

quotes.append(quote_element.get_text())

print(f”Scraped {len(quote_elements)} quotes from page {page_num}.”)

# Increment the page number for the next iteration

page_num += 1

# Add a delay of 2 seconds between requests to avoid overloading the server

time.sleep(2)

# Specify the path to the CSV file where you want to save the quotes

csv_file_path = f”C:\\Users\\your_username\\Desktop\\quotes.csv”  # Replace ‘your_username’ with your actual username

# Write the quotes to a CSV file

with open(csv_file_path, mode=’w’, newline=”, encoding=’utf-8′) as csv_file:

csv_writer = csv.writer(csv_file)

csv_writer.writerow([“Quote”])

for quote in quotes:

csv_writer.writerow([quote])

print(f”ChatGPT web scraping complete. Quotes scraped and saved to ‘{csv_file_path}'”)

Make sure you have the ‘requests’ and ‘beautifulsoup4’ libraries installed. You can install them using pip:

pip install requests beautifulsoup4

Before running the ChatGPT web scraping script, ensure you have the necessary libraries installed and update the ‘csv_file_path’ variable with the desired path where you want to save the CSV file on your Windows machine. Once you run the script in Visual Studio Code, it will scrape quotes from all available pages and save them to the specified CSV file.

Run the program from your IDE and save the CSV file for further analysis.

How to get ChatGPT to read a website

ChatGPT Plus, which uses the GPT-4 model, has offered the ability to connect to websites by using the Browse with Bing beta feature. The functionality to have the chatbot directly access websites has only been available for ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Enterprise subscribers.

Instead of accessing and reading a website directly, you can paste information to the chatbot to help it create your ChatGPT web scraping program. Users can paste the text contents of a website into the query field and instruct the chatbot to read and analyze the contents. This can be done up to 4,096 characters at a time.

You can instruct the chatbot that you will be pasting several parts of a webpage in a series of steps and that the chatbot should wait until you are finished pasting the entire content.

Your prompt may look like this:

I’m going to paste in the HTML of a website. I want to scrape the quotes from this site. Tell me the CSS path to the quotes on this site:

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html lang=”en”>

<head>

<meta charset=”UTF-8″>

<title>Quotes to Scrape</title>

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”/static/bootstrap.min.css”>

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”/static/main.css”>

</head>

<body>…

The response may look like this:

To scrape the quotes from the given HTML, you can use the following CSS path:

.quote > .text

This path selects all elements with the class ‘text’ that are direct children of elements with the class ‘quote’, which is where the quotes are contained based on the provided HTML structure.

How to use ChatGPT to fully automate web scraping

You may want to automate some of the web-scraping process. To add automation to your web scraping, you can ask ChatGPT for code that includes automation or for instructions about how else to automate your web scraping.

The response from ChatGPT may look like this:

Automating your script to run each day can be accomplished by using the Windows Task Scheduler, rather than modifying the Python code itself. However, if you want to have a Python script that waits and runs on its own each day without using an external scheduler, you would need to implement a loop with a delay.

Here is an example of how you might set up such a script to run once a day using Python’s ‘time’ module:

#Web scraping program with time delay for Code Interpreter ChatGPT article

import time

from datetime import datetime, timedelta

def run_my_scraping_script():

# Your existing ChatGPT web scraping code here

print(“Scraping website…”)

# Calculate the next time to run the script (tomorrow at the same time)

next_run_time = datetime.now() + timedelta(days=1)

while True:

# Check if the current time is past the next run time

if datetime.now() >= next_run_time:

run_my_scraping_script()

# Reset the next run time for the next day

next_run_time = datetime.now() + timedelta(days=1)

# Sleep for a while (e.g., 1 hour) before checking again

time.sleep(3600) # Sleeps for 1 hour

This script will run indefinitely and will execute ‘run_my_scraping_script()’ once a day at the time when the script was first started. However, please note that your computer needs to be running with the script active for this to work, and this isn’t a common practice for production environments due to its inflexibility and unreliability.

For a more robust solution, you would use the Windows Task Scheduler to execute your Python script at a set time each day. Here is a basic outline of the steps you would follow:

1. Save your Python script.
2. Open Windows Task Scheduler.
3. Create a new task.
4. Set the trigger to the time you want it to run every day.
5. Set the action to start a program, and provide the full path to your Python executable (which you can find by typing ‘where python’ in the command prompt) and the full path to your script as arguments.
6. Save the task.

This way, Windows will handle running your script at the same time each day, and you don’t need to leave a Python process running in the background on your computer.

How to hide your IP address with a proxy

There is always the possibility of getting blocked by websites when scraping the web. This happens when websites detect bot activity from your internet protocol (IP) address or if you were sending too many requests to the site in too short of a period. The website can then block your IP or even ban your IP from ever connecting to that site again. A solution to that problem is to use a proxy.

A proxy server uses an IP address that is different from your IP to connect you to sites, thus hiding your true IP address. This can be useful if you are ever banned from scraping a site because your IP address will be unaffected. Even better than simply using one proxy address, you can have rotating proxies as you visit and scrape websites, making you less likely to be blocked from scraping the sites.

Rayobyte offers several types of proxies:

• Data center IPs: These IP addresses come from a data center and can be dedicated or shared.
• Rotating data center proxies: Each time you connect to a port, your traffic will be routed through a new IP address.
• ISP proxies: These IPs come directly from internet service providers (ISPs).
• Residential proxies: These are IPs from residential addresses.
• Mobile proxies: Mobile IP addresses have the highest success rate of Rayobyte’s proxy offerings.
• Rayobyte’s Web Scraping API: Web-scraping API that can handle CAPTCHA authentication and browser scaling.

If you’re not writing your web scraping programs and would prefer a turn-key program ready to deploy, Rayobyte’s Web Scraping API has proxies built in. The built-in proxies allow you to scrape sites for the data you need without worrying about getting banned or even worrying about including proxy information in your code, as the proxies will already be included.

Once you’ve purchased a proxy, you can return to ChatGPT to instruct it to include your proxy address, port, username, and password so that the next time you scrape the web, your IP will be safe from being blocked or banned from websites.

ChatGPT web scraping program with proxies

The following is an example program that ChatGPT can provide. You can change the proxy information to include your proxy address, username, port, and password.

You can prompt ChatGPT with something like the following, which asks for additional code to add to the previous program that can include your proxies:

Now I need you to include proxies. Add the section where I can input my proxy password, username, port, and IP address, and tell me where in the program to put this section. Include Python comments that explain each line of code.

The response from ChatGPT:

Sure, I can help you add a section to the Python script for handling proxies. Here’s how you can modify the script to include proxy settings and input your proxy username, password, port, and IP address:

#Web scraping with proxies for Code Interpreter ChatGPT article

import requests

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

import csv

# Define proxy settings

proxy_username = “your_proxy_username”

proxy_password = “your_proxy_password”

proxy_ip = “your_proxy_ip”

proxy_port = “your_proxy_port”

# Define the URL of the website to scrape

base_url = “https://quotes.toscrape.com”

page_num = 1

quotes = []

# Create a proxy dictionary with the necessary information

proxy_dict = {

“http”: f”http://{proxy_username}:{proxy_password}@{proxy_ip}:{proxy_port}”,

“https”: f”https://{proxy_username}:{proxy_password}@{proxy_ip}:{proxy_port}”,

}

# Loop through pages until there are no more pages

while True:

# Construct the URL for the current page

url = f”{base_url}/page/{page_num}/”

try:

# Send a GET request to the URL using the proxy settings

response = requests.get(url, proxies=proxy_dict)

except requests.exceptions.RequestException as e:

print(f”Error: {e}”)

break

#The rest of the ChatGPT web scraping code is the same….

print(f”ChatGPT web scraping complete. Quotes scraped and saved to ‘{csv_file_path}'”)

In this modified ChatGPT web scraping script, you define your proxy settings at the beginning of the script with ‘proxy_username’, ‘proxy_password’, ‘proxy_ip’, and ‘proxy_port’. The script then creates a ‘proxy_dict’ dictionary to include the proxy information in the requests.

Make sure to replace ‘your_proxy_username’, ‘your_proxy_password’, ‘your_proxy_ip’ ,and ‘your_proxy_port’ with your actual proxy credentials and details.

With this addition, the script will use the provided proxy settings when sending GET requests to the website for scraping.

How to get Code Interpreter ChatGPT plugin

Code Interpreter ChatGPT is an official plugin from OpenAI currently in alpha testing. Code Interpreter ChatGPT is a plugin that can interpret Python code, lets you upload files such as Python files, and lets you download the results of the code execution. Code Interpreter ChatGPT can handle:

• Data analysis
• Data visualization
• Solve math problems
• Convert files between formats

At this time, you can join a waitlist to use plugins with ChatGPT, such as Code Interpreter ChatGPT. ChatGPT Plus subscribers can begin using Code Interpreter ChatGPT after filling in the form.

Final Thoughts On ChatGPT Web Scraping and How to Get Code Interpreter ChatGPT

ChatGPT web scraping is a quick, easy, and efficient way of collecting large amounts of data from websites. ChatGPT is a powerful new tool that lets users converse with a chatbot that can provide whole programs, perform data analysis, offer suggestions for strategies, and solve problems. Some of the programs that ChatGPT provides can include web scraping programs. Code Interpreter ChatGPT can help debug your code for more efficient web scraping.

For more information on web scraping and proxies, visit Rayobyte’s blog section. If you’d like to learn more about ChatGPT web scraping, how to get Code Interpreter ChatGPT, or to learn how we can get you started scraping the web with a proxy, contact us and let us know.

The information contained within this article, including information posted by official staff, guest-submitted material, message board postings, or other third-party material is presented solely for the purposes of education and furtherance of the knowledge of the reader. All trademarks used in this publication are hereby acknowledged as the property of their respective owners.