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Scraping book titles and authors from an online bookstore using Java
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?
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3 Replies
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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.
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To manage unexpected changes in structure, I implement dynamic selectors based on attributes rather than fixed class names. This makes the scraper more adaptable to layout updates.
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Storing book data in a database like MySQL allows for better organization and querying, especially when dealing with large datasets from multiple pages.
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