Scraping book titles and authors from an online bookstore using Java

General Web Scraping

Scraping book titles and authors from an online bookstore using Java

Posted by Emilia Maachah on 12/19/2024 at 5:16 am
Scraping book titles and authors from an online bookstore can be achieved efficiently using Java. Java’s Jsoup library is a powerful tool for parsing HTML and extracting specific data from static web pages. For dynamic websites that rely on JavaScript, integrating Java with Selenium WebDriver is necessary to interact with and render the content. The first step is to inspect the website’s structure and locate the tags or classes containing book titles and author names. Pagination is often involved, requiring additional logic to navigate through pages and scrape data iteratively.
Here’s an example using Jsoup to scrape book titles and authors:
```
import org.jsoup.Jsoup;
import org.jsoup.nodes.Document;
import org.jsoup.nodes.Element;
import org.jsoup.select.Elements;
public class BookScraper {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try {
            String url = "https://example.com/books";
            Document doc = Jsoup.connect(url).userAgent("Mozilla/5.0").get();
            Elements books = doc.select(".book-item");
            for (Element book : books) {
                String title = book.select(".book-title").text();
                String author = book.select(".book-author").text();
                System.out.println("Title: " + title + ", Author: " + author);
            }
        } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}
```
For scalability, adding multithreading to process multiple pages simultaneously improves efficiency. How do you handle dynamically loaded content or unexpected changes in the website structure?
Hirune Islam replied 2 days, 7 hours ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
1 Reply

Hirune Islam

Member
12/20/2024 at 11:51 am

When dealing with dynamic content, I use Selenium WebDriver with Java to ensure all elements are fully loaded before scraping. It’s slower than Jsoup but handles JavaScript-rendered content well.

Scraping book titles and authors from an online bookstore using Java

Hirune Islam